Francis Ford Coppola
Apocalypse Now

"My nightmare is to slip, crawl like a snail along the edge of a razor blade... and survive".

Anyone who has been to Vietnam no longer has a home. When you're at home you wish to return to the jungle, when you're among the charlie's you hope to return to your loved ones. This is the thought of Captain Willard, a soldier who has fought, killed, and seen his men butchered "for the biggest nothing in history".

Yet his place now is no longer by his wife's side. The walls of his house seem to close in on him more every day, making it feel increasingly cramped and suffocating. The dream is to be recruited for another mission, the final one, in which he can seek supreme redemption. Like every man at the front, he doesn't know whether to be beast or God, but, like every soldier who loses his life and kills in the yellow sewer, he is both. The longed-for hope becomes reality, and his life will henceforth be in the hands of the river, that river which will lead him to complete the secret mission for which he has been hired, and which, above all, represents for him an explanation for all the hell he has seen and endured.

But this time, the target is not a vietcong but a highly decorated American officer. A man with whom he shares practically everything. By successfully completing this trial, he can finally make sense of all the horror surrounding him and free himself from all the evil inside him. The river splits the jungle in two, sharp as a razor's edge.

On its banks, the ordinary madness of war unfolds, made even more surreal by a surfing trip under mortar fire, stages set up in the muck and blood where playboy bunnies parade seductively, fishermen massacred because of a girl trying to hide a puppy, the hypocrisy of saving them by giving them bandages when a moment before, they were cut in two by the mab, commanders who train the young to fire napalm but, at the same time, forbid them from writing the word fuck on the helicopters as it's considered obscene. Amid all this, Willard is in search of Colonel Kurtz. Kurtz has a story similar to his; he could be him. The Military Intelligence wants him dead because he is fighting a personal war with insane methods. But what made him so is the horror.

All American soldiers could become like Colonel Kurtz, especially Captain Willard. But Willard must overcome his deep admiration for the man who has quickly earned respect and reverence like a pagan god. Colonel Kurtz has understood why the Americans will never win the war and seeks to adopt and implement his beliefs that were born after the inhuman experience when he saw some charlie's amputate the arms of their children who were vaccinated shortly before by American soldiers. Colonel Kurtz cried like a granny but at the same time was enlightened as if he were on the road to Damascus. There must be no trace of sentimentality, no human charity, only cruelty, cynicism, destruction. But Colonel Kurtz is now tired and worn out by the horror and awaits nothing else than to die as a soldier. The final outcome can only be the meeting and union of the respective wills and aspirations of the two soldiers.

Based on "Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad and transposed by Francis Ford Coppola to Vietnam, "Apocalypse Now" is not simply a war movie, but it is above all a psychological manifesto on the instability of the human mind when one crosses the thin line that exists within every man between good and evil, what Kurtz calls "the point of no return".

In this sense, Marlon Brando's performance is astonishing, as he perfectly embodies the mixture of beast and God as separate entities existing in every soldier. A mixture, however, not perfected in Captain Willard, played by an excellent Martin Sheen, precisely because rather than being swept away by the sirens of omnipotence, he prefers to complete his mission.

"The President of the United States says there's a positive atmosphere in Vietnam... soldier, do you feel it?"

And would you feel it?