I have nothing but respect for Francis Ford Coppola. He is deservedly one of the greatest directors of all time and his style of film-making is pretty much inimitable. Yet I can't really say I enjoyed this movie. At least not the Redux version I saw.

First the good parts. It's a damn beautiful film. The mood, as they slowly drift up the Vietnamese river, keeps building and building and you can smell the heat and wetness in the air, feel the sweat dripping down your back, hear the hollow echoing screaming around you. The script was heavily inspired by the classic novella Heart of Darkness and that's exactly the mood and atmosphere they achieved.

The acting is also topnotch, with one glaring exception, and I've never seen Charlie Sheen do a more convincing role than here. You can almost see the cracks in their souls as the heaviness of the war settles around them as they are pulled from combat and send to face almost certain deaths as they hunt their elusive quarry.

It's a well-made film. Everything from camera-work to sets to directing works, and works so well, but the fact remains that's it's just too long. At least the Redux version. You can only stretch the atmosphere and suspense for so long until you start to look at the clock. That's partly the purpose and to this film's credit, any other film would have crumbled way sooner, but crumble it does, eventually.

I also have problems with Marlon Brando's performance. Apparently the man showed up hugely overweight, completely unprepared and pretty much being as unprofessional as you can be. And it shows. The final third of the film throws the suspense straight out of the window and pretty much the only question left is "Brando, what happened, man?"

I can see why people love this film. It's a haunting take on war, has amazing atmosphere, vivid imagery, memorable characters and as a whole there are very few movies like it. Personally I lost interest after the halfway point, but that's just me.

Apocalypse Now is an interesting film, not because it is supposedly an anti-war film, but because it is surreal and shows an interesting journey into madness.

Martin Sheen gives us an insight into his character here and we see the senselessness of the whole situation and how easy it is to lose yourself in certain situations.

We follow his journey and the various events that befall him and a small group of soldiers in a patrol boat traveling deep into the jungle. On their way, really bizarre things happen.

Along the way, we also see Robert Duvall in the role of a completely insane officer, whose episodic role has a profound impact on the film.

The film should essentially be anti-war, but it didn't strike me as such, but simply as a film about the fate of various people who found themselves in unusual situations.

Their whole mission doesn't really make sense, and in the end they accomplished nothing, but that's the point. Everything was really in vain.

The direction is excellent, the music is perfectly integrated into the film and matches the tone of the film.

For me, this is a film about the loss of reason and the journey to madness. If civilization completely collapses, and somewhere it has already collapsed a long time ago, this is roughly what we can expect, madness and insanity.

I watched three versions of the film and I liked the Redux version the best.

An interesting and brutal journey into madness and darkness.

Colonel Kurtz has disappeared within the jungle, with his troupe of fighting fiends ready to rumble, you've been tasked to take him out, but first you have to search and scout, along a river where the residents are disgruntled (to put it mildly). Lots of bloodshed, bullets, ballistics, then flow, there's napalm too that conjures up impressive glow, many lives are lost and taken, in this hell where you're forsaken, but don't ask why, because nobody really knows.

Still a spectacular piece of filmmaking that demonstrates on many levels the destruction, physical and mental that armed conflict causes, and yet we perpetually fail to learn from past events.