Apocalypse Now Redux

Such gorgeous explosions, such a terrible vision, such an amazing work of art. Go. Now. Read full review

The best film of 2001 was made in 1979. [10 Aug 2001, p.D1]

A spruced-up version has been re-released after 22 years, and the addition of 43 minutes means the story really has room to breathe. Read full review

More than ever it is clear that Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now is one of the great films of all time. It shames modern Hollywood's timidity. To watch it is to feel yourself lifted up to the heights where the cinema can take you, but so rarely does. Read full review

With its view of Vietnam as a colonial mud pit being raped by a post-rock generation, it’s as aimless as it is prescient. Coppola’s subjective use of technology (pathologically integrating operatic image and sound) evokes war as a psychedelic fugue state: timeless, horrifying, and affecting us all. Read full review

Director Francis Ford Coppola's revamping of his Vietnam epic, Apocalypse Now, with 49 added minutes, has significantly improved the troubled blockbuster. The film now seems both mellowed and — thanks in part to the most vibrant-looking prints in its 22-year history — revitalized. Read full review

If the original Apocalypse Now was a narrow, swiftly flowing river that gradually closed in on the patrol boat carrying Captain Willard into the heart of darkness, Apocalypse Now Redux is a wide river of greater depth, more variable currents and some fascinating new ports of call. Read full review

Perhaps returning to Apocalypse Now will reinvigorate the once brilliant storyteller. Certainly, the images, colors and design still astonish. And let's hope that Apocalypse Now Redux will become the definitive version. For the movie hits home even harder now. [14 May 2001]

What was impressive 22 years ago seems even more so now; what was problematic seems less important. Changes in us as an audience, changes in filmmaking fashions, changes in the times we live in, they've all combined in making this "Apocalypse" feel more impressive, more of a revelation than it did before. Read full review

The expanded "Redux" is even more resonant - partly because of its added material, and partly because the passage of time has increased the film's value as a key cultural document of the Vietnam War era and its aftermath. It's a movie not to be missed. Read full review

You won't see any film this year as beautiful, and plain thrilling as Apocalypse Now Redux. Watching it after sitting through this summer's record number of dumb, dreadful movies is almost a painfully good experience. [3 Aug 2001, p.30] Read full review

Apocalypse Now is about an American, perhaps a human madness. It searingly depicts, and finally embodies, the spiritual wounds men inflict on themselves and one another in the name of war. To gain the hearts and minds of a distant people, we lose our own souls. Read full review

Magnificent to look at, thrilling, ingenious, spellbinding and superbly done on every level, this is not just one of the best films of the year or the decade, but of all time. Read full review

If Apocalypse Now was criticized in the past as a series of impressive sequences that don't quite add up to a tidy story, the new additions put this in perspective. It's a filmed epic, not a filmed drama. [10 Aug 2001, p.R1]

It's an occasion for welcoming a restoration that transforms a flawed movie, one that was touched by greatness, into a masterpiece. [10 Aug 2001, p.W3]

With Apocalypse Now Redux — one for the ages when it comes to the moral battles of war — Coppola has reached the finish line at last. It smells like victory. Read full review

No matter how many times you've seen it, you marvel at how terrifying, gorgeous and surreal the jungle, the yellow napalm and, finally, the disturbed face of Martin Sheen lying under a swirling fan appear on the large screen. This is indeed, a dream. Read full review

Longer, more thorough and tweaked to play to modern audiences better, Apocalypse Now Redux packs every bit the wallop it did when it was new. After Gallipoli and Full Metal Jacket, after even Platoon, it remains the definitive anti-war war movie. Read full review

To look at Apocalypse Now is to realize that most of us are fast forgetting what a movie looks like -- a real movie, the last movie, an American masterpiece. Read full review

Apocalypse Now Redux is a reassuring rarity. It's an extended, re-edited version of Francis Ford Coppola's 'Nam masterpiece, with 49-minutes' worth of extra material spliced in, and the result is a genuinely stronger film. That's right - one of the best movies ever made just got better. Read full review

Now, it's a slower film, with a little more intellect and sentiment, but perhaps the added time to think will make you feel less overwhelmed. Read full review

Whether the new scenes make "Apocalypse" a better movie is debatable; for me, they were fascinating but not essential. Read full review

Better in certain ways than the original Apocalypse Now, though the flaws are also magnified. Read full review

Twenty-two years on, the picture has aged better than we have; it both feeds our hunger for sensation and scorns our impatient need to have it all right now—apocalypse is, whatever the title claims, always waiting round the river bend. Many people will continue to find it incoherent; but, frankly, given the choice between a work so laden with ambition that it nearly breaks its back and the stiff, crowing blockbusters of today, too timid to stretch their wings, I know which I would take. Read full review

I think Apocalypse Now Redux works better at the end now because it spells out the tension within Willard far more clearly than earlier versions did. Read full review

In spite of its limited perspective on Vietnam, its churning, term-paperish exploration of Conrad and the near incoherence of its ending, (it) is a great movie. It grows richer and stranger with each viewing, and the restoration of scenes left in the cutting room two decades ago has only added to its sublimity. Read full review

Whatever thematic clarity the added footage may confer is prosaic or didactic and intrusive; this stuff hit the cutting-room floor the first time around for good reason.

The movie's jabbing originality is what sticks in your memory. Read full review

Given the near total absence of intellectually ambitious American movies today, a critic's first impulse after seeing Francis Ford Coppola's reedited Apocalypse Now may be to treat it as the new, improved version he says it is and proclaim it a masterpiece - if not in 1979, then now. But it's not that simple: Apocalypse Now Redux is not a new movie, and neither is it necessarily improved. Read full review

The movie offers one of the great lost pleasures, one we so seldom encounter at the bijou anymore. You watch this monster unreeling in its splendid vitality, its absurd ambition, its wobbly tone, its beauty, its stupidity, its immaturity, its tragedy, its grandeur, and before you know it, close to four hours has blasted by. And when you leave, you seize whoever is up close to you -- friend or foe, stranger or lover -- and begin to talk. You have opinions. You must express yourself. You must be heard. [5 Aug 2001, p.G1]

It's a mixed blessing, in some ways even richer and more atmospheric than the original version, in others attenuated and logy. Read full review

Apocalypse Now Redux, which contains about 50 minutes of extra footage, is Coppola's final artistic assault. This is the one where he honors his vision -- or clears his name, whichever way you look at it. Does he do it? Perhaps the first thing to get out of your mind when watching this "Apocalypse," or the 1979 version, is worrying about whether the film's a success or failure. It's both. The more you see of "Apocalypse," the more obvious its triumphs and mistakes. Read full review

Nothing can redeem the movie's final 40 minutes. That may not be an ultimate horror, but it is a real one. Read full review

In any form, Apocalypse Now remains an audacious, powerful, and haunting vision of war as a waking nightmare, and the new print looks and sounds better than ever. But as much as Redux was born of Coppola's intellectual restlessness, it also speaks to his unwillingness to make tough choices and live with them. Read full review

Coppola's rethink of his Vietnam War epic is intriguing, but no significant improvement. Some of the added footage is fine, some redundant. Read full review

Apocalypse Now is a mixed bag, a product of excess and ambition, hatched in agony and redeemed by shards of brilliance. The new Redux version isn't a better film, but for Coppola fans and film lovers, it's essential viewing. Read full review

Apocalypse Now is one of those flawed films that contains enough masterful sequences to compel a viewer. Redux is merely a curiosity, and of interest only to those die-hards who believe this movie to be one of the greatest pictures ever to be projected in a theater. Read full review

I don’t think Apocalypse Now Redux is superior to the 1979 version. Quite the contrary, it’s draggier and more portentous, more inflated with its own importance. Read full review

The restored footage, nearly an hour of it, has at once bloated and diluted the work we've known and half-loved, undercutting its still-astonishing strengths while making its flaws leap out with unprecedented clarity. You can now fully appreciate the job that Coppola and his colleagues did in 1979 of salvaging what might have been a dud on the order of … Apocalypse Now Redux. Read full review