“Apocalypse Now is not merely the greatest film to come out of the Vietnam experience but one of the great works about the madness of our times.”
Companion screening to Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.
In Vietnam in 1970, Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) takes a perilous and increasingly hallucinatory journey upriver to find and terminate Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a once-promising officer who has reportedly gone completely mad. In the company of a Navy patrol boat filled with street-smart kids (Frederic Forrest, Sam Bottoms and Laurence Fishburne), a surfing-obsessed Air Cavalry officer (Robert Duvall), and a crazed freelance photographer (Dennis Hopper), Willard travels further and further into the heart of darkness… Francis Ford Coppola’s free-wheeling and iconoclastic adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella, Heart of Darkness, is one of the finest examples of the boundless creative energy unleashed by the New Hollywood of the 1970s - and one of the greatest war movies ever made. Note: we shall be screening the original (& best) 1979 cut.
