Apocalypse Now



Apocalypse Now is a 1979 American epic war film about the Vietnam War, directed, produced and co-written by Francis Ford Coppola. It stars Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Martin Sheen, Frederic Forrest, Albert Hall, Sam Bottoms, Laurence Fishburne and Dennis Hopper. Harrison Ford also makes an appearance in a small role. The screenplay, co-written by Coppola and John Milius and narration written by Michael Herr, was loosely based on the 1899 novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. The setting was changed from late 19th-century Congo to the Vietnam War (1969–70). The film follows a river journey from South Vietnam into Cambodia undertaken by Captain Benjamin L. Willard (a character based on Conrad's Marlow and played by Sheen), who is on a secret mission to assassinate Colonel Kurtz (Brando, with the character being based on Conrad's Mr. Kurtz), a renegade Army Special Forces officer accused of murder and who is presumed insane.

Milius became interested in developing Heart of Darkness into a Vietnam War film. Coppola expressed interest and eventually decided to take on the project, with the filmmaker taking influence from Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972). Initially set to be a five-month shoot, the film became noted for the problems encountered while making it for over a year, as chronicled in the documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991). These problems included Brando arriving on the set overweight and completely unprepared, expensive sets being destroyed by severe weather and Sheen having a breakdown and suffering a near-fatal heart attack while on location. Problems continued after production as the release was postponed several times while Coppola edited over a million feet of film.

Apocalypse Now was honored with the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, where it premiered unfinished before it was finally released on August 15, 1979, by United Artists. The film performed well at the box office, grossing $78 million domestically and going on to gross over $150 million worldwide. Initial reviews were mixed; while Vittorio Storaro's cinematography was widely acclaimed, several critics found Coppola's handling of the story's major themes to be anticlimactic and intellectually disappointing. Apocalypse Now is today considered to be one of the greatest films ever made. It was nominated for eight Academy Awards at the 52nd Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director (Coppola), and Best Supporting Actor for Duvall, and went on to win for Best Cinematography and Best Sound. It ranked No. 14 in Sight & Sound 's greatest films poll in 2012, and No. 6 in the Director's Poll of greatest films of all time. Roger Ebert also included it in his top 10 list of greatest films ever in 2012. In 2000, the film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant".

Plot
In 1969, during the Vietnam War, United States Army Special Forces Colonel Walter E. Kurtz has apparently gone insane; at an outpost in Cambodia, he commands Montagnard troops who see him as a demigod. Colonel Lucas and General Corman, increasingly concerned with Kurtz's vigilante operations, assign MACV-SOG Captain Benjamin L. Willard to "terminate" Kurtz with "extreme prejudice".

Willard, initially ambivalent, joins a United States Navy river patrol boat (PBR) commanded by Chief, with crewmen Lance, "Chef", and "Mr. Clean" to head upriver. They rendezvous with surfing enthusiast Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry Regiment commander, to discuss going up the Nùng River. Kilgore scoffs but befriends Lance after discovering he is a famous surfer and agrees to escort them through the Nùng's Viet Cong-held coastal mouth. The helicopter squadron raids at dawn, with Kilgore ordering a napalm strike on the Viet Cong. Willard gathers his men to the PBR and journeys upriver.

Tension arises as Willard believes himself in command of the PBR while Chief prioritizes other objectives over Willard's. Slowly making their way upriver, Willard reveals his mission partially to the Chief to assuage his concerns about why his mission should proceed. As night falls, the PBR reaches the American Do Lung Bridge outpost on the Nùng River. Willard and Lance enter seeking information for what is upriver. Unable to find the commander, Willard orders the Chief to continue as an unseen enemy launches an assault on the bridge.

The next day, Willard learns from dispatch that another MACV-SOG operative, Captain Colby, was sent on an earlier mission identical to Willard's and has since joined Kurtz. As the crew read letters from home, Lance activates a smoke grenade, attracting the attention of a camouflaged enemy and Mr. Clean is killed. Further upriver, Chief is impaled by a spear thrown by the natives and attempts to kill Willard by impaling him. Willard suffocates him and Lance buries Chief in the river. Willard reveals his mission to Chef, but despite Chef's anger towards the mission, he rejects Willard's offer for him to continue alone and insists that they complete the mission together.

The PBR arrives at Kurtz's outpost, and the surviving crew are met by an American freelance photojournalist, who manically praises Kurtz's genius. As they wander through, they come across a near-catatonic Colby, along with other US servicemen now in Kurtz's renegade army. Returning to the PBR, Willard later takes Lance with him, leaving Chef behind with orders to call in an airstrike on Kurtz's compound if they do not return.

In the camp, Willard is subdued, bound and brought before Kurtz in a darkened temple. Tortured and imprisoned for several days, Kurtz kills Chef and throws his head into Willard's lap. Willard is then released and allowed to freely roam the compound. Kurtz lectures him on his theories of war, the human condition and civilization, while praising the ruthlessness and dedication of the Viet Cong. Kurtz discusses his family and asks that Willard tell his son about him after his death.

That night, as the Montagnards ceremonially slaughter a water buffalo, Willard stealthily enters Kurtz's chamber as he is making a recording and attacks him with a machete. Mortally wounded, Kurtz utters "...The horror ... the horror ..." and dies. All in the compound see Willard departing, carrying a collection of Kurtz's writings, and bow down to him. Willard then leads Lance to the boat and they sail away. Kurtz's final words echo eerily as everything fades to black.

Cast

 * Martin Sheen as Captain Benjamin L. Willard, a veteran U.S. Army special operations officer who has been serving in Vietnam for three years. The soldier who escorts him at the start of the film recites that Willard is from 505th Battalion, of the elite 173rd Airborne Brigade, assigned to MACV-SOG. The opening scene—which features Willard staggering around his hotel room, culminating in him punching a mirror—was filmed on Sheen's 36th birthday when he was heavily intoxicated. The mirror that he broke was not a prop and caused his hand to bleed profusely, but he insisted on continuing the scene, despite Coppola's concerns. Sheen's son Charlie also appears in the film as an uncredited extra.
 * Marlon Brando as Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, a highly decorated U.S. Army Special Forces officer with the 5th Special Forces Group who goes rogue. He runs his own military unit based in Cambodia and is feared as much by the U.S. military as by the North Vietnamese and Vietcong.
 * Robert Duvall as Lieutenant Colonel William "Bill" Kilgore, 1st Squadron, 9th Cavalry Regiment commander and surfing fanatic. His character is a composite of several characters including Colonel John B. Stockton, General James F. Hollingsworth and George Patton IV, also a West Point officer whom Robert Duvall knew.
 * Frederic Forrest as Engineman 3rd Class Jay "Chef" Hicks, a tightly wound former chef from New Orleans who is horrified by his surroundings.
 * Albert Hall as Chief Petty Officer George Phillips. The Chief runs a tight ship and frequently clashes with Willard over authority.
 * Sam Bottoms as Gunner's mate 3rd Class Lance B. Johnson, a former professional surfer from Orange County, California. In the bridge scene, he mentions having taken LSD. He becomes entranced by the Montagnard tribe and participates in the sacrifice ritual.
 * Laurence Fishburne (credited as "Larry Fishburne") as Gunner's Mate 3rd Class Tyrone "Mr. Clean" Miller, the seventeen-year-old cocky South Bronx-born crewmember. Fishburne was only fourteen years old when shooting began in March 1976, as he had lied about his age in order to get cast in his role. The film took so long to finish that Fishburne was seventeen (the same age as his character) by the time of its release.
 * Dennis Hopper as an American photojournalist, a manic disciple of Kurtz who greets Willard. According to the DVD commentary of Redux, the character is based on Sean Flynn, a famed news correspondent who disappeared in Cambodia in 1970. His dialogue follows that of the Russian "harlequin" in Conrad's story.
 * G. D. Spradlin as Lieutenant General R. Corman, military intelligence (G-2), an authoritarian officer who fears Kurtz and wants him removed. The character is named after filmmaker Roger Corman.
 * Jerry Ziesmer as Jerry, a mysterious man in civilian attire who sits in on Willard's initial briefing. His only line in the film is "terminate with extreme prejudice". Ziesmer also served as the film's assistant director.
 * Harrison Ford as Colonel G. Lucas, aide to Corman and a general information specialist who gives Willard his orders. The character's name is a reference to George Lucas, who was involved in the script's early development with Milius and was originally intended to direct the film.
 * Scott Glenn as Captain Richard M. Colby, previously assigned Willard's current mission before he defected to Kurtz's private army and sent a message to his wife, intercepted by the U.S. Army, telling her that he was never coming back and to sell everything they owned, including their children.
 * Colleen Camp, Cynthia Wood and Linda Beatty as Playboy Playmates, Wood was the 1974 Playmate of the Year while Beatty was the August 1976 Playmate of the Month.
 * Bill Graham as Agent, the announcer in charge of the Playmates' show.
 * Francis Ford Coppola (cameo) as a TV news director filming beach combat; he shouts "Don't look at the camera, go by like you're fighting!" Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro plays the cameraman by Coppola's side.
 * R. Lee Ermey (uncredited) as Helicopter Pilot, Ermey, who was himself a former drill instructor and Vietnam War veteran.

Adaptation
Although inspired by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the film deviates extensively from its source material. The novella, based on Conrad's experience as a steamboat captain in Africa, is set in the Congo Free State during the 19th century. Kurtz and Marlow (whose corresponding character in the movie is Capt. Willard) work for a Belgian trading company that brutally exploits its native African workers.

After arriving at Kurtz's outpost, Marlow concludes that Kurtz has gone insane and is lording over a small tribe as a god. The novella ends with Kurtz dying on the trip back and the narrator musing about the darkness of the human psyche: "the heart of an immense darkness".

In the novella, Marlow is the pilot of a river boat sent to collect ivory from Kurtz's outpost, only gradually becoming infatuated with Kurtz. In fact, when he discovers Kurtz in terrible health, Marlow makes an effort to bring him home safely. In the film, Willard is an assassin dispatched to kill Kurtz. Nevertheless, the depiction of Kurtz as a god-like leader of a tribe of natives and his malarial fever, Kurtz's written exclamation "Exterminate all the brutes!" (which appears in the film as "Drop the bomb. Exterminate them all!") and his last words "The horror! The horror!" are taken from Conrad's novella.

Coppola argues that many episodes in the film—the spear and arrow attack on the boat, for example—respect the spirit of the novella and in particular its critique of the concepts of civilization and progress. Other episodes adapted by Coppola, the Playboy Playmates' (Sirens) exit, the lost souls, "take me home" attempting to reach the boat and Kurtz's tribe of (white-faced) natives parting the canoes (gates of Hell) for Willard, (with Chef and Lance) to enter the camp are likened to Virgil and "The Inferno" (Divine Comedy) by Dante. While Coppola replaced European colonialism with American interventionism, the message of Conrad's book is still clear.

It is often speculated that Coppola's interpretation of the Kurtz character was modeled after Tony Poe, a highly decorated Vietnam-era paramilitary officer from the CIA's Special Activities Division. Poe's actions in Vietnam and in the "Secret War" in neighboring Laos, in particular his highly unorthodox and often savage methods of waging war, show many similarities to those of the fictional Kurtz; for example, Poe was known to drop severed heads into enemy-controlled villages as a form of psychological warfare and use human ears to record the number of enemies his indigenous troops had killed. He would send these ears back to his superiors as proof of the efficacy of his operations deep inside Laos. Coppola denies that Poe was a primary influence and says the character was loosely based on Special Forces Colonel Robert B. Rheault, who was the actual head of 5th Special Forces Group (May to July 1969), and whose 1969 arrest over the murder of suspected double agent Thai Khac Chuyen in Nha Trang generated substantial contemporary news coverage, in the Green Beret Affair, including making public the phrase "terminate with extreme prejudice", which was used prominently in the movie.

Use of T.S. Eliot's poetry
In the film, shortly before Colonel Kurtz dies, he recites part of T. S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men". The poem is preceded in printed editions by the epigraph "Mistah Kurtz – he dead", a quotation from Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

Two books seen opened on Kurtz's desk in the film are From Ritual to Romance by Jessie Weston and The Golden Bough by Sir James Frazer, the two books that Eliot cited as the chief sources and inspiration for his poem "The Waste Land". Eliot's original epigraph for "The Waste Land" was this passage from Heart of Darkness, which ends with Kurtz's final words:

"Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, – he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath – "The horror! The horror!""

When Willard is first introduced to Dennis Hopper's character, the photojournalist describes his own worth in relation to that of Kurtz with: "I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas", from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock".

Development
While working as an assistant for Francis Ford Coppola on The Rain People, filmmaker John Milius was encouraged by his friends George Lucas and Steven Spielberg to write a Vietnam War film. Milius had wanted to volunteer for the war, and was disappointed when he was rejected for having asthma. Milius came up with the idea for adapting the plot of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness to the Vietnam War setting. He had read the novel as a teenager and was reminded about it when his college English professor, Irwin Blacker of USC, mentioned the several unsuccessful attempts to adapt it into a movie. Blacker challenged his class by saying, "No screenwriter has ever perfected a film adaption of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness."

Coppola gave Milius $15,000 to write the screenplay with the promise of an additional $10,000 if it were green-lit. Milius claims that he wrote the screenplay in 1969 and originally called it The Psychedelic Soldier. He wanted to use Conrad's novel as "a sort of allegory. It would have been too simple to have followed the book completely."

Milius based the character of Willard and some of Kurtz's on a friend of his, Fred Rexer. Rexer claimed to have experienced, first-hand, the scene related by Brando's character wherein the arms of villagers are hacked off by the Viet Cong. Kurtz was based on Robert B. Rheault, head of special forces in Vietnam. Scholars have never found any evidence to corroborate Rexer's claim, nor any similar Viet Cong behavior, and consider it an urban legend.

At one point, Coppola told Milius, "Write every scene you ever wanted to go into that movie", and he wrote ten drafts, amounting to over a thousand pages. Milius changed the film's title to Apocalypse Now after being inspired by a button badge popular with hippies during the 1960s that said "Nirvana Now". He was influenced by an article written by Michael Herr titled "The Battle for Khe Sanh", which referred to drugs, rock 'n' roll, and people calling airstrikes down on themselves. He was also inspired by such films as Dr. Strangelove.

Milius says the classic line "Charlie don't surf" was inspired by a comment Ariel Sharon made during the Six-Day War, when he went skin diving after capturing enemy territory and announced, "We're eating their fish." He says the line "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" just came to him.

Milius had no desire to direct the film himself and felt that Lucas was the right person for the job. Lucas worked with Milius for four years developing the film, alongside his work on other films, including his script for Star Wars. He approached Apocalypse Now as a black comedy, and intended to shoot the film after making THX 1138, with principal photography to start in 1971. Lucas's friend and producer Gary Kurtz traveled to the Philippines, scouting suitable locations. They intended to shoot the film in both the rice fields between Stockton and Sacramento, California, and on-location in South Vietnam, on a $2 million budget, cinéma vérité style, using 16 mm cameras, and real soldiers, while the war was still going on. However, due to the studios' safety concerns and Lucas's involvement with American Graffiti and Star Wars, Lucas decided to shelve the project for the time being.

Pre-production
Coppola was drawn to Milius's script, which he described as "a comedy and a terrifying psychological horror story". In the spring of 1974, Coppola discussed with friends and co-producers Fred Roos and Gray Frederickson the idea of producing the film. He asked Lucas and then Milius to direct Apocalypse Now, but both men were involved with other projects; in Lucas's case, he got the go-ahead to make Star Wars, and declined the offer to direct Apocalypse Now. Coppola was determined to make the film and pressed ahead himself. He envisioned the film as a definitive statement on the nature of modern war, the difference between good and evil, and the impact of American society on the rest of the world. The director said that he wanted to take the audience "through an unprecedented experience of war and have them react as much as those who had gone through the war".

In 1975, while promoting The Godfather Part II in Australia, Coppola and his producers scouted possible locations for Apocalypse Now in Cairns in northern Queensland, that had jungle resembling Vietnam. He decided to make his film in the Philippines for its access to American military equipment and cheap labor. Production coordinator Fred Roos had already made two low-budget films there for Monte Hellman, and had friends and contacts in the country. Coppola spent the last few months of 1975 revising Milius's script and negotiating with United Artists to secure financing for the production. According to Frederickson, the budget was estimated between $12 and 14 million. Coppola's American Zoetrope assembled $8 million from distributors outside the United States and $7.5 million from United Artists who assumed that the film would star Marlon Brando, Steve McQueen and Gene Hackman. Frederickson went to the Philippines and had dinner with President Ferdinand Marcos to formalize support for the production and to allow them to use some of the country's military equipment.

Casting
Steve McQueen was Coppola's first choice to play Willard, but the actor did not accept because he did not want to leave America for seventeen weeks. Al Pacino was also offered the role, but he too did not want to be away for that long and was afraid of falling ill in the jungle as he had done in the Dominican Republic during the shooting of The Godfather Part II. Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford, and James Caan were approached to play either Kurtz or Willard. Tommy Lee Jones, Keith Carradine, Nick Nolte, and Frederic Forrest were also considered for the role of Willard.

In a 2015 The Hollywood Reporter interview, Clint Eastwood revealed that Coppola offered him the role of Willard, but much like McQueen and Pacino, did not want to be away from America for a long time. Eastwood also revealed that McQueen tried to convince him to play Willard; McQueen wanted to play Kurtz because then he would only have to work for two weeks.

Coppola and Roos had been impressed by Martin Sheen's screen test for Michael in The Godfather and he became their top choice to play Willard, but the actor had already accepted another project and Harvey Keitel was cast in the role based on his work in Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets. Principal photography began three weeks later. Within a few days, Coppola was unhappy with Harvey Keitel's take on Willard, saying that the actor "found it difficult to play him as a passive onlooker". After viewing early footage, the director took a plane back to Los Angeles and replaced Keitel with Martin Sheen. By early 1976, Coppola had persuaded Marlon Brando to play Kurtz for an enormous fee of $3.5 million for a month's work on location in September 1976. Dennis Hopper was cast as a war correspondent and observer of Kurtz; when Coppola heard Hopper talking nonstop on location, he remembered putting "the cameras and the Montagnard shirt on him, and [shooting] the scene where he greets them on the boat". James Caan was the first choice to play Colonel Lucas. Caan wanted too much money for what was considered a minor part in the movie, and Harrison Ford was eventually cast instead.

Principal photography
On March 1, 1976, Coppola and his family flew to Manila and rented a large house there for the five-month shoot. Sound and photographic equipment had been coming in from California since late 1975.

Typhoon Olga wrecked the sets at Iba and on May 26, 1976, production was closed down. Dean Tavoularis remembers that it "started raining harder and harder until finally it was literally white outside, and all the trees were bent at forty-five degrees". One part of the crew was stranded in a hotel and the others were in small houses that were immobilized by the storm. The Playboy Playmate set had been destroyed, ruining a month's shooting that had been scheduled. Most of the cast and crew went back to the United States for six to eight weeks. Tavoularis and his team stayed on to scout new locations and rebuild the Playmate set in a different place. Also, the production had bodyguards watching constantly at night and one day the entire payroll was stolen. According to Coppola's wife, Eleanor, the film was six weeks behind schedule and $2 million over budget; he had to offer his car, house, and The Godfather profits as security to finish the film.

Coppola flew back to the U.S. in June 1976. He read a book about Genghis Khan to get a better handle on the character of Kurtz. After filming commenced, Marlon Brando arrived in Manila very overweight and began working with Coppola to rewrite the ending. The director downplayed Brando's weight by dressing him in black, photographing only his face, and having another, taller actor double for him in an attempt to portray Kurtz as an almost mythical character.

After Christmas 1976, Coppola viewed a rough assembly of the footage but still needed to improvise an ending. He returned to the Philippines in early 1977 and resumed filming. On March 5 of that year, Sheen had a heart attack and struggled for a quarter of a mile to reach help. By that time, the film was already so over-budget, even he worried funding would be halted if word about his condition were to reach the investors, and claimed he suffered heat stroke instead. He was back on the set on April 19, and during the interim, his brother Joe Estevez filled in for him and provided voice overs needed for his character. Coppola later admitted that he can no longer tell which scenes are Joe and which are Martin. A major sequence in a French plantation cost hundreds of thousands of dollars but was cut from the final film. Rumors began to circulate that Apocalypse Now had several endings but Richard Beggs, who worked on the sound elements, said, "There were never five endings, but just the one, even if there were differently edited versions". These rumors came from Coppola departing frequently from the original screenplay. Coppola admitted that he had no ending because Brando was too fat to play the scenes as written in the original script. With the help of Dennis Jakob, Coppola decided that the ending could be "the classic myth of the murderer who gets up the river, kills the king, and then himself becomes the king – it's the Fisher King, from The Golden Bough".

A water buffalo was slaughtered with a machete for the climactic scene. The scene was inspired by a ritual performed by a local Ifugao tribe which Coppola had witnessed along with his wife Eleanor (who filmed the ritual later shown in the documentary Hearts of Darkness) and film crew. Although this was an American production subject to American animal cruelty laws, scenes like this filmed in the Philippines were not policed or monitored and the American Humane Association gave the film an "unacceptable" rating. The budget remained a problem; after Star Wars became a gigantic hit, Coppola sent a telegram to George Lucas asking for money. Principal photography ended on May 21, 1977.

Post-production and audio
Japanese composer Isao Tomita was scheduled to provide an original score, with Coppola desiring the film's soundtrack to sound like Tomita's electronic adaptation of The Planets by Gustav Holst. Tomita went as far as to accompany the film crew in the Philippines, but label contracts ultimately prevented his involvement. In the summer of 1977, Coppola told Walter Murch that he had four months to assemble the sound. Murch realized that the script had been narrated but Coppola abandoned the idea during filming. Murch thought that there was a way to assemble the film without narration but it would take ten months and decided to give it another try. He put it back in, recording it all himself. By September, Coppola told his wife that he felt "there is only about a 20% chance [I] can pull the film off". He convinced United Artists executives to delay the premiere from May to October 1978. Author Michael Herr received a call from Zoetrope in January 1978 and was asked to work on the film's narration based on his well-received book about Vietnam, Dispatches. Herr said that the narration already written was "totally useless" and spent a year writing various narrations with Coppola giving him very definite guidelines.

Murch had problems trying to make a stereo soundtrack for Apocalypse Now because sound libraries had no stereo recordings of weapons. The sound material brought back from the Philippines was inadequate, because the small location crew lacked the time and resources to record jungle sounds and ambient noises. Murch and his crew fabricated the mood of the jungle on the soundtrack. Apocalypse Now had novel sound techniques for a movie, as Murch insisted on recording the most up-to-date gunfire and employed the Dolby Stereo 70 mm Six Track system for the 70 mm release. This used two channels of sound from behind the audience as well as three channels of sound from behind the movie screen. The 35 mm release used the new Dolby Stereo optical stereo system, but due to the limitations of the technology at the time, this 35 mm release that played in the majority of theaters did not include any surround sound.

In May 1978, Coppola postponed the opening until spring of 1979 and screened a "work in progress" for 900 people in April 1979 that was not well received. That same year, he was invited to screen Apocalypse Now at the Cannes Film Festival. United Artists were not keen on showing an unfinished version in front of so many members of the press. Since his 1974 film The Conversation won the Palme d'Or, Coppola agreed to screen Apocalypse Now with only a month before the festival. The week prior to Cannes, Coppola arranged three sneak previews of slightly different versions. He allowed critics to attend the screenings and believed that they would honor the embargo placed on reviews. On 14 May, Rona Barrett reviewed the film on television and called it "a disappointing failure". At Cannes, Zoetrope technicians worked during the night before the screening to install additional speakers on the theater walls, to achieve Murch's 5.1 soundtrack. On August 15, 1979 Apocalypse Now was released in the U.S. in only 15 theaters equipped to play the Dolby Stereo 70mm prints with stereo surround sound.

Alternative and varied endings
At the time of its release, discussion and rumors circulated about the supposed various endings for Apocalypse Now. Coppola said the original ending was written in haste, where Kurtz convinced Willard to join forces and together they repelled the air strike on the compound. Coppola said he never fully agreed with the Kurtz and Willard dying in fatalistic explosive intensity, preferring to end the film in a more encouraging manner.

When Coppola originally organized the ending, he considered two significantly different ends to the movie. One involved Willard leading Lance by the hand as everyone in Kurtz's base throws down their weapons, and ends with images of Willard piloting the PBR slowly away from Kurtz's compound, this final scene superimposed over the face of a stone idol, which then fades into black. The other option showed an air strike being called and the base being blown to bits in a spectacular display, consequently killing everyone left within it.

The original 1979 70mm exclusive theatrical release ended with Willard's boat, the stone statue, then fade to black with no credits, save for '"Copyright 1979 Omni Zoetrope"' right after the film ends. This mirrors the lack of any opening titles and supposedly stems from Coppola's original intention to "tour" the film as one would a play: the credits would have appeared on printed programs provided before the screening began.

There have been, to date, many variations of the end credit sequence, beginning with the 35 mm general release version, where Coppola elected to show the credits superimposed over shots of the jungle exploding into flames. Rental prints circulated with this ending, and can be found in the hands of a few collectors. Some versions of this had the subtitle "A United Artists release", while others had "An Omni Zoetrope release". The network television version of the credits ended with "...from MGM/UA Entertainment Company" (the film made its network debut shortly after the merger of MGM and UA). One variation of the end credits can be seen on both YouTube and as a supplement on the current Lionsgate Blu-ray.

Later when Coppola heard that audiences interpreted this as an air strike called by Willard, Coppola pulled the film from its 35 mm run and put credits on a black screen. However, the "air strike" footage continued to circulate in repertory theaters well into the 1980s, and it was included in the 1980s LaserDisc release. In the DVD commentary, Coppola explains that the images of explosions had not been intended to be part of the story; they were intended to be seen as completely separate from the film. He had added the explosions to the credits as a graphic background to the credits.

Coppola explained he had captured the now-iconic footage during demolition of the sets (set destruction and removal was required by the Philippine government). Coppola filmed the demolition with multiple cameras fitted with different film stocks and lenses to capture the explosions at different speeds. He wanted to do something with the dramatic footage and decided to add them to the credits.

Apocalypse Now Redux
In 2001, Coppola released Apocalypse Now Redux in cinemas and subsequently on DVD. This is an extended version that restores 49 minutes of scenes cut from the original film. Coppola has continued to circulate the original version as well: the two versions are packaged together in the Complete Dossier DVD, released on August 15, 2006 and in the Blu-ray edition released on October 19, 2010.

The longest section of added footage in the Redux version is the "French Plantation" sequence, a chapter involving the de Marais family's rubber plantation, a holdover from the colonization of French Indochina, featuring Coppola's two sons Gian-Carlo and Roman as children of the family. Around the dinner table, a young French child recites a poem by Charles Baudelaire entitled L'albatros. The French family patriarch is not satisfied with the child's recitation. The child is sent away. These scenes were removed from the 1979 cut, which premiered at Cannes. In behind-the-scenes footage in Hearts of Darkness, Coppola expresses his anger, on the set, at the technical limitations of the shot scenes, the result of tight allocation of resources. At the time of the Redux version, it was possible to digitally enhance the footage to accomplish Coppola's vision. In the scenes, the French family patriarchs argue about the positive side of colonialism in Indochina and denounce the betrayal of the military men in the First Indochina War. Hubert de Marais argues that French politicians sacrificed entire battalions at Điện Biên Phủ, and tells Willard that the US created the Viet Cong (as the Viet Minh) to fend off Japanese invaders.

Other added material includes extra combat footage before Willard meets Kilgore, a humorous scene in which Willard's team steals Kilgore's surfboard (which sheds some light on the hunt for the mangoes), a follow-up scene to the dance of the Playboy Playmates, in which Willard's team finds the Playmates stranded after their helicopter has run out of fuel (trading two barrels of fuel for two hours with the Bunnies), and a scene of Kurtz reading from a Time magazine article about the war, surrounded by Cambodian children.

A deleted scene titled "Monkey Sampan" shows Willard and the PBR crew suspiciously eyeing an approaching sampan juxtaposed to Montagnard villagers joyfully singing "Light My Fire" by The Doors. As the sampan gets closer, Willard realizes there are monkeys on it and no helmsman. Finally, just as the two boats pass, the wind turns the sail and exposes a naked dead civilian tied to the sail boom. His body is mutilated and looks as though the man had been whipped. The singing stops. As they pass on by, Chief notes out loud, "That's comin' from where we're going, Captain." The boat then slowly passes the giant tail of a shot down B-52 bomber as the noise of engines high in the sky is heard. Coppola said that he made up for cutting this scene by having the PBR pass under an airplane tail in the final cut.

First Assembly
A 289-minute First Assembly circulates as a video bootleg, containing extra material not included in either the original theatrical release or the "redux" version.

Apocalypse Now Final Cut
In April 2019, Coppola showed Apocalypse Now Final Cut for the 40th anniversary screening at the Tribeca Film Festival. This new version has a runtime of three hours and two minutes, with Coppola having cut 20 minutes of the added material from "Redux". It is also the first time the film has been restored from the original camera negative at 4K; previous transfers were made from an IP. It will be released in autumn 2019, along with an extended cut of The Cotton Club. It also had a release in select IMAX theaters on August 15 and 18, 2019.

Cannes screening
A three-hour version of Apocalypse Now was screened as a "work in progress" at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival and met with prolonged applause. At the subsequent press conference, Coppola criticized the media for attacking him and the production during their problems filming in the Philippines and said, "We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane", and "My film is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam". The filmmaker upset newspaper critic Rex Reed who reportedly stormed out of the conference. Apocalypse Now won the Palme d'Or for best film along with Volker Schlöndorff's The Tin Drum – a decision that was reportedly greeted with "some boos and jeers from the audience".

Box office
Apocalypse Now performed well at the box office when it opened in August 1979. The film initially opened in one theater in New York City, Toronto, and Hollywood, grossing US$322,489 in the first five days. It ran exclusively in these three locations for four weeks before opening in an additional 12 theaters on October 3, 1979 and then several hundred the following week. The film grossed over $78 million domestically with a worldwide total of approximately $150 million.

The film was re-released on August 28, 1987 in six cities to capitalize on the success of Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, and other Vietnam War movies. New 70 mm prints were shown in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, St. Louis and Cincinnati – cities where the film did financially well in 1979. The film was given the same kind of release as the exclusive engagement in 1979, with no logo or credits and audiences were given a printed program.

Critical response
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 97% based on 87 reviews, with an average rating of 8.91/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "Francis Ford Coppola's haunting, hallucinatory Vietnam War epic is cinema at its most audacious and visionary." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 94 out of 100 based on 15 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".

Upon its release, Apocalypse Now received mixed reviews. In his original review, Roger Ebert wrote, "Apocalypse Now achieves greatness not by analyzing our 'experience in Vietnam', but by re-creating, in characters and images, something of that experience". In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Charles Champlin wrote, "as a noble use of the medium and as a tireless expression of national anguish, it towers over everything that has been attempted by an American filmmaker in a very long time". Other reviews were less positive; Frank Rich in Time said: "While much of the footage is breathtaking, Apocalypse Now is emotionally obtuse and intellectually empty". Vincent Canby argued, "Mr. Coppola himself describes it as "operatic," but ... Apocalypse Now is neither a tone poem nor an opera. It's an adventure yarn with delusions of grandeur, a movie that ends—in the all-too-familiar words of the poet Mr. Coppola drags in by the bootstraps—not with a bang, but a whimper."

Ebert added Coppola's film to his list of The Great Movies, stating: "Apocalypse Now is the best Vietnam film, one of the greatest of all films, because it pushes beyond the others, into the dark places of the soul. It is not about war so much as about how war reveals truths we would be happy never to discover".

Various commentators have debated whether Apocalypse Now is an anti-war or pro-war film. Some commentators' evidence of the film's anti-war message include the purposeless brutality of the war, the absence of military leadership, and the imagery of machinery destroying nature. Advocates of the film's pro-war stance, however, view these same elements as a glorification of war and the assertion of American supremacy. According to Frank Tomasulo, "the U.S. foisting its culture on Vietnam," including the destruction of a village so that soldiers could surf, affirms the film's pro-war message. Additionally, the author Anthony Swofford recounted how his marine platoon watched Apocalypse Now before being sent to Iraq in 1990 in order to get excited for war. Nidesh Lawtoo illustrates the pro-war/anti-war tendencies of the film by focusing on the contradictory responses the movie in general and the "Ride of the Valkyries" scene in particular triggered in a university classroom. According to Coppola, the film may be considered anti-war, but is even more anti-lie: "...the fact that a culture can lie about what's really going on in warfare, that people are being brutalized, tortured, maimed, and killed, and somehow present this as moral is what horrifies me, and perpetuates the possibility of war".

In May 2011, a newly restored digital print of Apocalypse Now was released in UK cinemas, distributed by Optimum Releasing. Total Film magazine gave the film a five-star review, stating: "This is the original cut rather than the 2001 'Redux' (be gone, jarring French plantation interlude!), digitally restored to such heights you can, indeed, get a nose full of the napalm."

Legacy
Today, the movie is regarded by many as a masterpiece of the New Hollywood era. Roger Ebert considered it to be the finest film on the Vietnam war and included it on his list for the 2002 Sight & Sound poll for the greatest movie of all time. It is on the American Film Institute's 100 Years...100 Movies list at number 28, but it dropped two to number 30 on their 10th anniversary list. Kilgore's quote, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning," written by Milius, was number 12 on the AFI's 100 Years ... 100 Movie Quotes list and was also voted the greatest movie speech of all time in a 2004 poll. It is listed at number 7 on Empire's 2008 list of the 500 greatest movies of all time. Entertainment Weekly ranked Apocalypse Now as having one of the "10 Best Surfing Scenes" in cinema.

In 2002, Sight and Sound magazine invited several critics to name the best film of the last 25 years and Apocalypse Now was named number one. It was also listed as the second best war film by viewers on Channel 4's 100 Greatest War Films and was the second rated war movie of all time based on the Movifone list (after Schindler's List) and the IMDb War movie list (after The Longest Day). It is ranked number 1 on Channel 4's 50 Films to See Before You Die. In a 2004 poll of UK film fans, Blockbuster listed Kilgore's eulogy to napalm as the best movie speech. The helicopter attack scene with the Ride of the Valkyries soundtrack was chosen as the most memorable film scene ever by Empire magazine (this same piece of music was also used in 1915 to similar effect to accompany The Birth of a Nation). This scene is recalled in one of the last acts of the 2012 video game Far Cry 3 as the song is played while the character shoots from a helicopter. It was likewise adapted for the Cat's Eye anime episode "From Runan Island with Love" and the Battle of Italica scene in Gate: Jieitai Kano Chi nite, Kaku Tatakaeri.

In 2009, the London Film Critics' Circle voted Apocalypse Now the best film of the last 30 years.

In August 2009, the head of the German Financial Regulator told the Bundestag Finance Committee that the failure of the "terrible" Depfa Bank, which was completely supervised by its Irish equivalent, led to the collapse of its German parent which forced Berlin to bail it out at a cost of €102 billion. The committee was told that the alternative was a run on German banks and the eventual collapse of the European finance system, and "You would have woken up on Monday morning in the film Apocalypse Now".

In 2011, actor Charlie Sheen, son of the film's leading actor Martin, started playing clips from the film on his live tour and played the film in its entirety during post-show parties. One of Sheen's films, the 1993 comedy Hot Shots! Part Deux, includes a brief scene in which Charlie is riding a boat up a river in Iraq while on a rescue mission and passes Martin, as Captain Willard, going the other way. As they pass, each man shouts to the other "I loved you in Wall Street!", referring to the 1987 film that had featured both of them. Additionally, the promotional material for ''Hot Shots! Part Deux included a mockumentary that aired on HBO titled Hearts of Hot Shots! Part Deux—A Filmmaker's Apology, in parody of the 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, about the making of Apocalypse Now''.

The film is credited with having created the Philippines surfing culture based around the town of Baler where the helicopter attack and surfing sequences were filmed.

On January 25, 2017, Coppola announced that he was seeking funding through Kickstarter for a horror role-playing video game based on Apocalypse Now. The game has since been canceled by Montgomery Markland (the game's director), as revealed on the game's official Tumblr page.

Simulacra and Simulation
French theorist Jean Baudrillard dedicated a chapter to Apocalypse Now in his 1981 treatise Simulacra and Simulation. Baudrillard accuses the Vietnam War, which he considered to be a non-event, of having become "film" and Coppola of having made the Vietnam War an actual event and a victory through the film Apocalypse Now:

"Coppola makes his film like the Americans made war — in this sense, it is the best possible testimonial — with the same immoderation, the same excess of means, the same monstrous candor ... and the same success. The war as entrenchment, as technological and psychedelic fantasy, the war as a succession of special effects, the war become film even before being filmed ... In this sense, his film is really the extension of the war through other means, the pinnacle of this failed war, and its apotheosis. The war became film, the film becomes war, the two are joined by their common hemorrhage into technology ... The real war is waged by Coppola as it is by Westmoreland: without counting the inspired irony of having forests and Philippine villages napalmed to retrace the hell of South Vietnam ... Coppola can certainly deck out his helicopter captain in a ridiculous hat of the light cavalry, and make him crush the Vietnamese village to the sound of Wagner's music — those are not critical, distant signs, they are immersed in the machinery, they are part of the special effect, and he himself makes movies in the same way [as Wagner], with the same retro megalomania, and the same non-signifying furor, with the same clownish effect in overdrive.

[I]f the Americans (seemingly) lost the other [war], they certainly won this one. Apocalypse Now is a global victory. Cinematographic power equal and superior to that of the industrial and military complexes, equal or superior to that of the Pentagon and of governments."

Awards and honors

 * American Film Institute lists
 * AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies – No. 28
 * AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes:
 * "I love the smell of napalm in the morning." – No. 12
 * AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) – No. 30

Home video releases
The first home video releases of Apocalypse Now were pan-and-scan versions of the original 35 mm Technovision anamorphic 2.39:1 print, and the closing credits, white on black background, were presented in compressed 1.33:1 full-frame format to allow all credit information to be seen on standard televisions. The first letterboxed appearance, on Laserdisc on December 29, 1991, cropped the film to a 2:1 aspect ratio (conforming to the Univisium spec created by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro), and included a small degree of pan-and-scan processing at the insistence of Coppola and Storaro. The end credits, from a videotape source rather than a film print, were still crushed for 1.33:1 and zoomed to fit the anamorphic video frame. All DVD releases have maintained this aspect ratio in anamorphic widescreen, but present the film without the end credits, which were treated as a separate feature. The Blu-ray releases of Apocalypse Now restore the film to a 2.39:1 aspect ratio, making it the first home video release to display the film in its original theatrical aspect ratio.

As a DVD extra, the footage of the explosion of the Kurtz compound was featured without text credits but included commentary by Coppola, explaining the various endings based on how the film was screened.

On the cover of the Redux DVD, Willard is erroneously listed as "Lieutenant Willard".

Lionsgate released a 6-disc 40th anniversary edition on August 27, 2019. It includes two 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray discs and four standard Blu-ray discs, containing the theatrical version, Redux, and the Final Cut featuring 4K restorations from the original camera negative. Previous extras (including the Hearts of Darkness documentary) have been re-used for this release, along with brand new content including a Tribeca Film Festival Q&A with Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Soderbergh and never-before-seen B-roll footage.

Documentaries
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (American Zoetrope/Cineplex Odeon Films) (1991) Directed by Eleanor Coppola, George Hickenlooper, and Fax Bahr

Apocalypse Now – The Complete Dossier DVD (Paramount Home Entertainment) (2006). Disc 2 extras include:
 * The Post Production of Apocalypse Now: Documentary (four featurettes covering the editing, music, and sound of the film through Coppola and his team)
 * "A Million Feet of Film: The Editing of Apocalypse Now" (18 minutes). Written and directed by Kim Aubry.
 * "The Music of Apocalypse Now" (15 minutes)
 * "Heard Any Good Movies Lately? The Sound Design of Apocalypse Now" (15 minutes)
 * "The Final Mix" (3 minutes)