Heralded by many as the film that crystalises most perfectly the American experience of the Vietnam War, Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Cannes winning, hallucinatory masterpiece gets a stunning new cut and 4K restoration to mark the 40th anniversary of its original release.

Transplanting Joseph Conrad’s novella ‘Heart of Darkness’ into the Vietnam War, Apocalypse Now follows US Army Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) on a special mission upriver into the heart of the jungle to ‘terminate’ the once celebrated, now renegade, Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) –a man waging his own personal and violent war and a dangerously lethal presence within a local tribe. As Willard travels further into the depths of the Vietnamese jungle he begins to submerge himself wholly into the insanity of war, revealing the fractured psychosis of the conflict.

The troubled production of Coppola’s psychedelic war epic is calcified into legend. Offered the chance to rewrite his own history, Coppola says he now has a cut he can stand behind. Shorter than the 202-minute Redux version released in 2001 (that used scenes excised from the 1979 theatrical cut at the behest of the studio), this Final Cut splits the difference between the creative concessions of the 1979 original and the unwieldy sprawl of the 2001 Redux. And in doing so reins an extraordinary feat of filmmaking craft in to the general neighbourhood of perfection.

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