https://youtu.be/VyNwha5hrAo
The horror.
I like the film, but not for the reasons these people apparently do...I view it as parody, a form of entertainment.
The Leftists out there see it as a documentary.
I remember the scene on the beach as AirCav attacked the seaside village.
Robert DuVal is standing there impervious to the explosions and chaos. He looks at two guys holding surfboards and says...
“Either you surf or you fight!”
The first half of that flick is OK. The second half is drek and not worth sitting through.
My favorite movie. One of the greatest ever filmed. If you think it is a war movie, then you are missing out.
Most over rated movie ever
It was also the 1st Hollywood movie to depict all US soldiers as bloodthirsty rapist thugs.
To me, it was a boring counterculture flick that spoke rebellion against our efforts to impede communist expansionism.
I read somewhere that the Sheen family invited Marlon Brando over for dinner during the filming and Martin’s wife prepared a huge bowl of spaghetti for all to serve from - when she set it on the table, Brando grabbed it and started chowing down on it without a second thought.
Movie is great film for the first half. Second half falls off the cliff.
What’s most bizarre about it is all the references to the work of T.S. Eliot; The Hollow Men, Love Song of J. Alfred Prufroc, etc. Hopper’s jabbering “I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”
One of the props you can only make out on the big sreen or the BluRay version is a book on Col. Kurt’z bookcase titled “The Golden Bough” by James Frazier. In it Frazier opines that all pre-Christian religions were fertility cults in which it was customary to periodically sacrifice a sacred king at harvest time so he might be reincarnated in the spring.
In “The Waste Land,” Eliot credits The Golden Bough as inspiration for much of his work. And this allegorically is why the dirty deed had to be done by Capt. Willard and not by some facesless arclight strike. Willard had to spill Kurz’s blood as a form of sacrifice, just like the water buffalo the natives were killing.
Also bizarre how appropriate Morrison’s Oedipean opus “The End” is to the storyline. Appropriate background music to Willard going up the snakey river to kill his symbolic father.
The framework of the film might have come from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness but the individual scenes — like the stoner GI called “Roach” who blasts the VC in the wire with his M79 “bloop” gun, aiming only by the sound of their voices in the darkness — are vignettes lifted from Michael Herr’s “Dispatches,” supposedly true stories he wrote while a reporter for Rolling Stone magazine in Vietnam.
A seriously weird and seriously complex film, even without all the drama that went on during its filming.
The best scene ever put into a movie is the Helicopter attack with Wagner playing. Pure genius.
Step dad was a 173rd soldier that hated this film...
Could never figure out why...