Within the first few minutes, the audience becomes as transfixed as the characters by Coppola’s surrealist vision of the Vietnamese War as a descent into barbarism and madness.
War is depicted as a festering corruption of the mind, senseless but exacting, that lurks before dissecting the characters with clinical accuracy as their sanity is lost to the Nung River. Old film celluloid crackles and burns; the screen and the audience are still for a few moments. The black gradually fades into a stunning wide shot to the whirring din of a helicopter as its blades slice through the Vietnam sky at a soaring altitude.
The film’s engagement with Vietnam as an independent actor was perhaps best described by Coppola: “[My film] is not about Vietnam; it is Vietnam, it’s what it was really like.” That is what the audience witnesses first as the black fades: not a soldier, not an M14 rifle, nor even the military helicopter itself, but a palm forest set ablaze by a howling inferno – the countryside beauty of Vietnam devastated by man’s wrath in a crazed conflict that most now regard as entirely pointless.
‘The End’ by The Doors, a song which could not have been more perfectly timed and paired both technically and thematically, cries out into the ravaged wilderness, in nondiegesis. Contemplative camerawork bides its time, tracking the extent of the destruction. “Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain...”, a despairing Jim Morrison intones like a sermon; a lyric written directly in reference to the enduring trauma felt by Vietnam’s veterans after their discharge.
A sound bridge between the helicopters and a ceiling fan transports the audience from theVietnamese jungle to an awry hotel bedroom. The song softens until it disappears, but it never truly ends. From there, the “wilderness of pain” rears its head as the plot begins: Captain Willard, portrayed by the electric Martin Sheen, focuses his haunted mind in pursuit of the deranged megalomaniac, Colonel Kurtz, in cinema’s most mesmerising, perplexing and riveting rhapsody about the Vietnamese War.
Francis Ford Coppola evokes the hypnotic bedlam of war with breathtaking visual imagery, atmospheric use of sound and sprawling establishing shots that disturb as often as they amaze. The cinematography, directing, performances, soundtrack, colour grading, lighting, wardrobe, score, sound mixing and production value are all effectively peerless. Every frame is rich with a distinctive character and a natural vibrancy that pops from the screen.
Competing for the viewer’s scattered gaze, warring components of the production and mise-en-scene operate seamlessly in concert to illustrate the confused depravity of Southern Vietnam and Cambodia. The disharmony and erratic passion of the production are felt as deeply by the audience as they were by the cast and crew. Coppola never grants you a moment’s peace from the psychedelic hostility and shallow degeneracy of conflict.
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