Apocalypse Now: Final Cut

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

1979 / 183min / 4K DCP

Forty years after emerging from the bush with his psychotropic, hallucinatory vision of the Vietnam War cribbed from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and lent phantasmagorical vividness by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, and 18 after presenting his longer-by-49-minutes Apocalypse Now: Redux, Coppola went upriver one more time on the hunt for his elusive masterwork. The result, whose runtime lands midway between that of the original Apocalypse and its first revision—excising the PT boat crew’s ugly romp with stranded Playboy Playmates, retaining their languid stopover at a French plantation stuck outside of time—is what Coppola calls his definitive version, a film that endeavors not so much to “explain” the appalling American adventure in southeast Asia as to embody the feeling of a ghastly hangover after two imperialist sprees.

Distributor: Rialto Pictures