Apocalypse Now

[osprey_archer]

Myra and I watched Apocalypse Now, because it's on the AFI top 100 movie list, and holy shit you guys, this movie is so weird. (I feel this way about lots of the movies on this list. Myra's comment was that they're not necessarily on the list for intrinsic quality, but because they caused a sea change in the movie industry - hence the fact that the

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[osprey_archer]

It does feel like a hallucination. The scenes where he's at the army bases especially, they just feel so unreal - which of course ties back to Willard's inveighing against all the lies that the war spawns, and the fact that he comes to admire Kurtz in an odd way because at least Kurtz is honest, goddammit.

Although he seems to move away from the admiration once he actually sees Kurtz's corpse-strewn fort and Kurtz starts trying to abuse/entice him into joining him - he still sympathizes with Kurtz (I think WIllard sees it as a mercy killing, and not a sacrifice - he thinks he's doing it for Kurtz, not for the army, although of course that's also a convenient rationalization for carrying out his orders...)

Anyway. He still sympathizes with Kurtz, but I think by the end he decides that Kurtz's blunt honesty - the fact that he doesn't try to cloak his actions with mumbo-jumbo about the morality of them, like the soldier on the helicopter announcing "We are here to help" as behind him the other soldiers destroy a village - isn't redemptive, either.