Apocalypse Now, horror and power of destruction of our

Apocalypse Now is not a war movie. Conceived initially from Joseph Conrad's book Heart of Darkness, which tells of the pursuit of an adventurer in the jungles of the Congo, he was transposed into the Vietnam War, where he certainly found a scenario even gloomier than the original story.

What you see in the movie are guns. Weapons that, at first glance, would be the most obvious element of a "war" movie, but which, during the narrative, show their power to bring forth the horror and power of destruction that, we discover, dwells in each one of us.

The main plot shows Captain Willard, from the so-called "special forces" (read license to kill), who, like a backward Ulysses, heads to a remote location on the battlefield in Cambodia, with the mission of exterminating the Colonel Kurtz, a decorated officer who, insane, starts to command an army of mountaineers as if he were a demigod.

On board a US Navy patrol boat in the company of four crew members, the captain climbs the Nùng River on a mind-blowing bad trip laden with icons of the American way of life as background for destruction.

Thus, a surfing competition is why Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore (who loves the smell of napalm in the morning) destroys all the vegetation of an island. On a routine inspection on a fishing boat, a puppy becomes a motive for slaughter. Two of the boat's characters are equally ridiculously killed.

Strangely, the encounter with Colonel Kurtz (the moment we finally find Marlon Brando, though half hidden by Vittorio Storaro's magical lenses) is not as shocking as the expectation of reviewing the best actor in the world in action.

But nothing, neither the revivals nor alternative endings nor criticism nor problems of production take from Apocalypse Now the brilliance of being one of the darker films already released, and one of the majors in the history of the cinema.

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