Francis Ford Coppola
Apocalypse Now

LA RECENSIONE

It's something that returns punctually, a fixed appointment, inevitable, a dream that tears through the night and screams without voice and soulless, the worst nightmare, a curse that descends, relentless, into the menacing darkness, and envelops everything, it is war, despair, monstrous thoughts that slither among the yellowish flames of Hades, when divine omens of misfortune served little, messengers of death dressed in green, it was useless to establish the worthy compensation, the thirty pieces of silver that tormented Christ still glisten, nor could the worst drought drain the blood that has washed hands and flooded bodies and entire villages, a torrential mix of brain matter and organic liquid, bloody epic novels, psychedelic and cannibal screenplays, aerospace legions and thermonuclear battleships facing each other on a ground of sand and brown earth pyramids, palm-wide bullets crawling on the cruel bare tabletop of animal chronology and decomposing into minute exploding radioactive elements, lunar sun that dazzles the refracting surface of glasses on soldiers' helmets, warriors advancing, one against the other, dragging the unredeemed alchemy of iron-clad funeral logic, the dominion of underground armies spreads like the dark shadow of an oriental cloud, crippled horses rearing at the roar of machine guns, the specter of a desolate and desolating post-industrial Middle Ages flees from the foggy truths of a pantagruelian cinematic work, larger than Welles, Eisenstein, Gone with the Wind, Wilder, and Buñuel, greater than the gargantuan Coppola himself, something that detaches from the screen, black foggy plasticized resin, a long stream of alien busts on the skinned mantle of war, the apocalypse, now, as the old and exhausted civilization, far from its plastiline hierarchs and from a vessel that continues to sink day after day, hour after hour, a ship on whose deck flies a tattered and frayed flag, the greasy emblem of a democracy now reached an expedited burial, Willard is tired and watches the scene from the riverbank, with a glassy gaze and wet hair, the twilight drifts away from Kurt's mausoleum while the armies of half the world sharpen their swords and prepare for a new war.