Apocalypse Now (1979)
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
At the height of the Vietnam war, Captain Benjamin Willard is sent on a dangerous mission that, officially, "does not exist, nor will it ever exist." His goal is to locate - and eliminate - a mysterious Green Beret Colonel named Walter Kurtz, who has been leading his personal army on illegal guerrilla missions into enemy territory.
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3 films that influenced Apocalypse Now
What critics say influenced Apocalypse Now
Roger Ebert, who considers this film one of the best ever made, calls it "foolhardy", and compares it to other mad masterworks like Erich von Stroheim's Greed (1924) and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979).
Seven years before Apocalypse Now , young Bavarian director Werner Herzog embarked on his own journey into the heart of darkness.
Only a handful of modern films share the audacity of his vision; I think of “ 2001: A Space Odyssey ” and “ Apocalypse Now .”
Francis Ford Coppola was clearly influenced by this film when he made “Apocalypse Now” several years later.
And the film is also a precursor to Coppola's Apocalypse Now as the rafts drift silently down the Amazon with its unseen enemies, muddled motivations and ill-defined destination.
A lengthy interlude involving a Civil War skirmish may strike some viewers as inspired and others as irrelevant (this draggy sequence reminded me of the out-of-left-field "French plantation" scene that was inserted years later to Apocalypse Now), yet the rest of the picture, with 18 restored minutes upping the running time to a full three hours, is guaranteed to cause filmwatcher delirium.
A visit to a fruitless standoff between Confederate and Union soldiers at a bridge, where a drunken Union commander laments the slaughtering of his men, could be a model for the way Francis Ford Coppola captured the lunacy of war more than a decade later in "Apocalypse Now."
Gareth Edwards' 2014 "Godzilla" takes its cues from that great sequence, and from the 1954 original's Hiroshima-and-Nagasaki inspired tracking shot past a row of bloodied hospital patients, and the camcordered immediacy of " Cloverfield ," and the gas station sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds," and the Do Lung Bridge sequence of " Apocalypse Now ," in which American soldiers' enemies were portrayed as faraway shadows, shooting flares and yelling obscenities.