Just finishing up watching this movie for the umpteenth time. The surreal weirdness of this movie has always captivated me for some reason. Anyone else here likes or hates this flick ?

Good one! Although I like “Platoon” and “Full Metal Jacket” a little better. But then I never thought Marlon Brando was much of an actor.

Redux with all that French Plantation business is super bizarro. Heart of Darkness it is.

I love the smell of napalm in the morning.

Love it. Similar to Godfather I and II, one hell of a production to pull off. Always had the utmost respect for Vietnam Vets.

"It smells like....victory"

Love it. Hell of a movie! Had Dennis Hopper in my office once to use my phone. Super nice guy. He was in our small town filming a movie back in the days before cell phones. I worked in a smallish town in Georgia where Sweet Home Alabama was filmed and a few more movies.

It's a cool movie. I expect Platoon and FMJ are a lot more realistic as far as most people's Vietnam War experience. Great adventure movie. Great cast and story.

Harvey Keitel started out as Capt. Willard, but was fired. Ironically, Keitel was a former Marine.

When ever I watch that filick it reminds me of crashing off speed or acid.

Brain fried, and a shower don't make me feel clean!




ya!

GWB

In fact MSGT Davis, an instructor in my ROTC Brigade said that in his experience, Platoon was a lot closer than Apocalypse Now, but he caveated that with the fact that he wasn't in Special Forces. He was in the 1st Cav. though.

A perplexing movie IMO, one I'll watch from time to time with mixed opinions.

The river boats(PBR's) interest me the most as one of my best friends served 3 tours on them. His stories, slide show, plus the movie gives me just a bit of understanding

Come to think of it, have I asked my bud about that movie??

Having never ingested LSD, I'll have to take your word for it.

Saw it last yr w that in it and was ?
Didnt remember that the other times i watched it.

Realistic or not, didnt care.....i liked the movie.

It’s okay in my opinion. I really enjoyed Duvall’s character.
The second half of the movie seems to drag on forever.
R. Lee Ermey made an appearance as a chopper pilot.
PBR’s are cool!

My Brother-in-Law served on a PBR, told me sometimes they transported Mercs upriver, sometime SF guys. They got into some pretty hairy firefights along the way.

The late 80’s - the early 90’s are a blur. I agree wholeheartedly with G-dub. Brings a different understanding to a lot of the movie.

Got to meet R Lee Ermey when he was the Glock Spokesman. Very nice fellow. Very gracious and down to earth to.

It's an absurd fest of the worst of Hollywood excess. Copolla was a spoiled fool at that point and the movie is a string of gross self indulgences one after the other. Most beer swiling dolts remember the dumb macho-bravado flight of the valkyries/napalm-in-the-morning scene with patriotic sentiment, but the rest of the movie, they don't even get it. Brando agreed to do one month of "work" on the film for $2 million and 10% of some royalties (which worked out to $9 million). In today's dollars, that's 43 million. They couldn't even film him except in shadows because he was massively overweight. There was no room in the plot for a 350 pound Colonel Kurtz with type II diabetes. He certainly didn't earn 43 million dollars for his acting in the movie. Coppola downplayed Brando's weight by dressing him in black, photographing only his face, and having another, taller actor double for him. The whole mystical shroud around Kurtz's character is basically because $43 million was only enough to get Brando on the set, not to give a flip about making the movie.

Brando wasn't the only catastrophic disaster in making that movie. Hurricane Olga destroyed the sets and they had to be rebuilt. Martin Sheen, who was like the 47th choice to play Willard suffered a heart attack during production and his brother had to fill in to do the voice overs. I'm not criticizing the film for these unfortunate disasters, but they did exacerbate the prodigious budget overruns.

Repeatedly, the film went way over the budget only to have Copolla invest more of his own money to save it. Copolla himself is said to have described it this way: "We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane"

When I see it, I just see gross self-indulgence for no good cause. The film doesn't say anything meaningful about Vietnam -- it was never about Vietnam -- and it doesn't contribute anything artistically. It's not art. It's just a bunch of rich ass hats displaying their ineptitude and jerking themselves off by stroking their egos. If you want to watch a couple of fat fcuk Hollywood [bleep] spluge all over themselves, watch Apocalypse Now. There's even several versions because they think their chits artistic Cannes film crap that people will keep paying more money for them to reissue.

Surely one of the ten greatest movies made so far. And this is, to me, the best line from any movie. What makes it so was not just the context but the depth of layers with which Duvall delivered the line. Brilliance.

RS

A lot of the stuff you speak of comes directly from the documentary on the making of the movie called, Hearts of Darkness. The movie was highly anticipated and considered by many to be a flop.

“Charlie don’t surf”…

pretty good to watch now and then. more than a tad overdone but not as bad as the crap that has come out in the last 20 years. martin sheens voice (or his brothers) narrating gave it a nice touch.

Pretty much sums up what I think of Brando. Always thought he was an overrated hack.

The Vietnam Vets I knew and know said the same. That Platoon was the closest to the real deal.

How the hell did Martin Sheen have a heart attack at 36?

I’m guessing Coke. Like Father Like Son.

about six months ago (I think) I stumbled across a link to the entire audio (dialogue and all) while searching for contributions to the Friday music thread...
I have seen it enough times that I could picture everything in my head while listening...
kind of like radio hour...
it is one of the few movies that can stand up to that test, in my humble opinion...

Born in '51.
Lets just say that a number of movies, (quite a few watched during an altered state of consciousness) had different emotional effects.
Most do not have the impact now that they did at the time, as everything was new back then.

In an absolutely random order......

Easy Rider
Aldous Huxley's "The Devils"
A Clockwork Orange,
The Deer Hunter,
Once Upon a time in the West
Billy Jack
Deliverance
Tommy
Jesus Christ Superstar
Thief
Dr. Strangelove
Dr Zhivago
Last Tango in Paris
Cool Hand Luke
The Godfather
Midnight Cowboy
The Point
Taxi Driver
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (read the book first along with The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test )
Little Big Man
Three Days of the Condor
Papillion
Straw Dogs

could go on and on but methinks I'll do that a bit later once I'm wrapped in the arms of Bacchus

ya!

GWB

How could you leave out Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”?

Apocalypse Now was rather bizarre. Platoon had elements of the real deal at times. YMMV

The best scene in the whole movie is the Do Lung Bridge scene.

You need to watch the documentary on the making of Apocalypse. Call Heart of Darkness. Might be more interesting than the movie.

Never cared for the movie. Also thought it was way overdone and it just didn’t strike me as “real”

Didn’t love platoon much either.

Full Metal Jacket is the best war movie ever made. The only one that might share that title is saving private Ryan

IIRC, Apocalypse Now was the most expensive movie ever made at the time. $32 mil.

Yep

See the Documentary and you'll see why!!

You are correct, it was never about Vietnam. It was an modern adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Brando showed up never having read the scrip, or Conrad's classic novel.

If you're speaking to me, I've seen the documentary, as implied by my post earlier in this thread, where I cited it with its actual name.

The movie certainly was about the Vietnam War. Conrad's novel about the Congo was re-worked to fit into America's Vietnam War experience. At the time, very few movies had been made about the war. The Deer Hunter, another movie which wasn't a very broad slice of the war, Coming Home, an anti-war hippie fest with Jane F u c k i n g Fonda, The Boys in Company C and Go Tell the Spartans which was about advisors very early in the war. Both Platoon and FMJ came about five or six years later with Purple Hearts, in between.

I thought that the casting of Martin Sheen as the SF/CIA assassin was completely unbelievable. He did not look physically whatsoever like he'd gone through Special Forces training. No muscle mass or definition and appeared (to me) he'd not be able to march a ¼ mile with a heavy ruck, or fight his way out of a paper bag. I've known several vets who were S.F., SEALs, Force Recon, etc., and they were very fit with defined muscles. The physical training that "special operators" go through, Special Forces, SEALs, Rangers, Force Recon, Parajumpers, etc., requires very physically fir young men. Sheen did not fill the bill at all.

As for Platoon, Oliver Stone, who wrote and directed Platoon, is a Vietnam vet. Two tours, 25th Inf. Div. LRRP. Purple Heart, Bronze Star with V., and then in the 1st Cav. Another Purple Heart. Aside from some "movie literary license," I thought Stone made a very good Vietnam movie.

My opinion.

L.W,

So what if I don't know what 'Apocalypse' means?

It's not the end of the world!

I'm a fan. Thought it was great. Seems to me I recall it was based on a true story of a major that went rogue.

I’ve only watched bits and pieces of Apocalypse Now. The most dramatic movie scene that I’ve ever watched was The Deer Hunter scene while they’re being made to play Russian Roulette by the viet cong.

Great scene and great movie. IMO though, The Deer Hunter isn't nearly as good as Apocalypse Now.

I need to check it out. I’ve seen the iconic helicopter scene but somehow missed seeing it all the way through.

While it's good to see the Director's Cut, I actually think the original theatrical release is superior. A lot of stuff in the Director's Cut had been edited out...because it needed to be edited out.

One of the best films ever made.

+1

Nope. Previous poster

"The Brothers, Bloods" in Platoon were just like the ones in my Company in Germany, '72-73. Not a pleasant memory for me, especially since they and the "Blood wannabe Puerto Ricans" comprised about 70% of our Battalion. No VC Incoming, but plenty of bootheels and knives, plus "Politically Correct" Army BatCrap Craziness.

Hacking up the live cow was awesome.

yep pretty much my Army experiance in HAAF Savannah GA 83-86.learned my mother was reall wrong about a few things

I always remembered the scene where the crashed B-52 tail was sticking up in the air as the boat went by ,surreal , kinda cool ,but i didnt think we had any B-52 BUFF'S shot down over South Vietnam or even Loas or Cambodia. North Vietnam ..yes .. . So that kinda made it unreal for me

That was my experience as well. I met him at the NRA convention in Houston a few years back. Had a good conversation with him about the M-1903 Springfield vs the M-1917 Enfield rifles. We was very sincere and quite likeable. He gave my daughter an autographed photo. Really enjoyed talking with him.

I have read Heart Of Darkness. It’s pretty wild someone adapted that to the Vietnam war

Just as an aside, in 2020 the director, Spike Lee, made a movie called Da 5 Bloods. It's about five black Vietnam vets circa 2019/2020, friends who served in Vietnam in the same infantry platoon, who get together to return to Vietnam and find a large stash of CIA gold that went down in a CIA plane in the jungle. The five black soldiers found it (circa 1969/1970) hid it, and planned to return someday, smuggle the gold back secretly to the U.S., and live life large.

But, the best laid plans often go awry. All kinds of obstacles and difficulties arise, and things in Vietnam take a severe downturn in their plans.

It is one of the dumbest, couldn't happen movies Spike Lee has ever made and typically, it is Lee's very anti-white people bias, anti-white soldiers, etc., screed.

If I'd not watched it free gratis for nuthin', had to pay to see it in a theater, I'd have walked out mid-movie and demanded my money back.

Anyone else waste their time viewing Da 5 Bloods?

L.W.

Won’t waste my time watching anything that POS made.

Love it, always have. Especially when super drunk or smoking good ganja or doing shrooms .... three completely different movies than when watching it sober.

Any scene with a helicopter was my favorite. An empty Huey has a max payload of 9500 lbs. Maybe 10,000 in an emergency. No way in hell could a D model sling load a PBR. But, I didn't learn that until many years after first seeing the movie. It makes for a good script.

kwg

I shot alongside Ermey at the CMP Eastern Games held at Butner, NC a few years ago. Nice unassuming fella, as long as you didn't stick a camera in his face when you asked him for his autograph.
Here he is at the national matches at Camp Perry responding to someone who had his camera rolling: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zPlqMKYQdrQ

WTF?! I try not to watch anything with “‘Da” in the title…

Yep. He gave me an autographed photo also. And took a “selfie” with him too.

Apocalypse Now is a Stanley Kubrick film - of course it's a blend of reality with the surreal..

I like your "enlightened" way of thinkin' geedubya.

I wonder how many others cop to it?

Things certainly do look different under other circumstances.

The only thing missing is the smell.

Never get out of the boat!