Summary
- The different versions of Apocalypse Now have sparked debates about which is the best, with Coppola's own opinions sometimes aligning with widely accepted attitudes.
- The troubled production of the film, including Martin Sheen's heart attack and Coppola's nervous breakdown, was documented in the acclaimed making-of film Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse.
- The theatrical version of Apocalypse Now is considered by many to be the definitive version, though the Final Cut and Redux versions also have their merits. Despite their differences, each version of the film deserves respect for its unique aspects and the challenges faced during its creation.
The multiple Apocalypse Now versions that have come out over the years have offered a lot of different ways to watch the acclaimed question as well as a lot of questions about which is the best version. Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam War film stands out within the genre at least partly because of the different versions that exist and the debate that has cropped up as a result. Coppola has his own opinions of each, which can differ from and line up with some of the widely accepted attitudes towards each version.
The movie not only goes down in history as one of the best war movies ever made but one of the most controversial behind the scenes. Martin Sheen had a heart attack, Francis Ford Coppola fired a key actor and had a nervous breakdown, and Marlon Brando went full method in his role as Colonel Walter Kurtz. Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse documented it in one of the best making-of films ever made. Despite the difficult time making the movie, Coppola has returned to Apocalypse Now several different times to explore the movie in new ways. However, there is still a lot of debate about which of the Apocalypse Now versions is the definitive one.
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All versions of Apocalypse Now are available to rent on Apple TV.
Why There Are So Many Versions Of Apocalypse Now Explained
The Troubled Production Resulted In Lots Of Footage And Changes In The Story
In 1975 Coppola was coming off a series of massive successes. He had written and directed The Godfather and its sequel along with the film The Conversation in the early 1970s. All three movies were critically and commercially successful, and they helped to solidify the New Hollywood era that began in the late 60s after the death of the old studio system. Francis Ford Coppola's next movie was a modern riff on the Joseph Conrad novel Heart of Darkness, transporting it from the Congo in the 1890s into the waning days of America's time in Vietnam.
The film follows a young army captain with PTSD who's given the assignment to venture into the jungle and assassinate a rogue American colonel who has gone insane. Written by legendary screenwriter John Milius, it was originally going to be directed by George Lucas, who chose Star Wars instead and left Coppola to take over as director. Apocalypse Now was originally supposed to be shot over five months in 1976 but, famously, the production became a disaster. The documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse details everything that went wrong. Five months of shooting became a year of shooting.
Sets were destroyed by weather, filming was interrupted by an actual civil war, and Martin Sheen had a near-fatal heart attack on set. Coppola shot over a million feet of film (a fully edited version of a typical 2-hour movie is roughly 11,000 feet of film). Understandably, it took Coppola and multiple full-time editors years to cut the footage into a presentable final product. The myriad production issues that are part of the true story behind Apocalypse Now's creation are mainly to blame for why so many versions of the film exist, and why it was 40 years later that Apocalypse Now: Final Cut finally came out.
Apocalypse Now Referenced Marlon Brando & Francis Ford Coppola's First Movie (5 Years Before The Godfather)
Before their historic collaboration on The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola & Marlon Brando both worked on a 1967 dramatic thriller.
Apocalypse Now Theatrical Version
Coppola's Need For A Hit Prompted A Mainstream Cut
The Apocalypse Now original theatrical version came out of this tortured process. There were several "work in progress" versions of varying lengths shown to limited audiences and eventually a long version shown at the Cannes Film Festival that some loved and others hated. The entire production of this film became a media frenzy and many people thought it was going to be an absolute failure that would ruin Coppola's career. Despite the praise Apocalypse Now gained in the years since its release, the theatrical version is not the film that Coppola originally wanted to make.
Interestingly, Francis Ford Coppola has had to self-fund his films at times, and he had sunk so much money into the movie that he needed it to be a success, so Coppola consciously took out what he considered the weirder parts of the film to make sure it would appeal to a general audience. This line of thinking paid off as Apocalypse Now was a huge box office success and has since had an enduring legacy as a modern classic. It's likely a miracle that it came out at all and even more so that its theatrical version became one of the greatest films of the 1970s.
Apocalypse Now Redux
The Reinstated Scenes Make For A Slower And More Ponderous Version
In 2001, Coppola re-edited Apocalypse Now to put all the sequences he had removed from the theatrical version back into it. Titled Apocalypse Now Redux - a retitling convention followed by The Godfather Part 3's Coda version - Coppola's new version of the film is widely considered a massive step down from the original. A film's edit can be a delicate thing, and even the smallest changes can radically alter what the movie ultimately is. Apocalypse Now Redux's differences disrupted the original film's ecology and created a bloated, slow, and uneven version of Apocalypse Now that is considered much worse than the version audiences were already familiar with.
First Assembly
The First Edit Was Never Intended For Public Viewing
Another version of Apocalypse Now floated around - a bootleg copy. An assembly version is the very first edit of a film, featuring every scene that was shot, intended only for the creative team to view before the rough-cut version. Apocalypse Now's assembly cut leaked and was spread around on videotape. It would be one of the longest Francis Ford Coppola movies of all time, coming in at 289 minutes, and it included material not featured in any other version of the movie. This draft of Apocalypse Now is probably too unwieldy to be considered a good movie, but it is an interesting watch for those so inclined.
Apocalypse Now Final Cut
Coppola Addressed Criticism With Redux With A Leaner Cut
40 years after the original version of Apocalypse Now was released, Francis Ford Coppola decided not only to oversee a brand-new restoration of the film but also to create a brand-new version. The Apocalypse Now final version came out in 2019 and was a significant improvement of Apocalypse Now Redux. Coppola took in the criticisms of the Redux version and crafted a new version that trimmed back many of the added scenes or cut them out again entirely.
This version paid much more attention to the ecology of the film and works much better than Redux. What was even more exciting about Apocalypse Now: Final Cut was that the new 4k transfer was made from the original film negative rather than the interpositive used in all previous transfers of the film, so the final version is definitely the best-looking of all the versions and is the one that Coppola himself is most proud of.
Why The Theatrical Version Is The Best Version
The Focused Story Still Feels Epic And Engrossing
While the Apocalypse Now Final Cut is a step up from the Redux, and some consider it on the same level as the original, the first theatrical version will always be the definitive version of Francis Ford Coppola's classic and it is the tightest and most focused edit, though no less bizarre even with the stranger sequences cut out. That being said, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now: Final Cut is still a fascinating companion piece to the original and Coppola has made all versions of the film easily available to the public, even packaging the theatrical version and Redux together in DVD releases.
The theatrical version of Apocalypse Now is the film that audiences fell in love with, and it's what became a classic piece of 1970s American cinema. The existence of the other versions doesn't create competition as to which version is best but rather serves as an opportunity for audiences to see how much a film can change by taking out, putting in, and rearranging the edited sequences. The hope is that Coppola is finally satisfied with the movie and that there's now a version of Apocalypse Now he can fully stand behind as the movie he set out to make.