Coppola's nightmare of war and madness develops into a relevant remake of Joseph Conrad's novel. I think, however, that the word nightmare should be relevant to every understanding of the film - when Kurtz is heard in the very beginning telling of his nightmare about a snail, could that be Coppola's nightmare?

Some fans of Conrad's novel dislike the film because it substitutes the aspect of war for the aspect of colonialism. Also, some of the symbolism in the film was hardly in the novel, for example the implications of playing The Doors 'The End' while Kurtz is killed: The lyrics explicitly mentions the murder of a father and the fatherly qualities of Kurtz are thus further underlined. The symbolism is subtle, but nevertheless there. Also, the reference to Jimi Hendrix' 'Purple Haze' gives the widespread purple flares a new meaning. This may be a result of the widespread drug use of most of the production team - a sort of true psychedelia. The overall idea, however, is that the film is filled with references to the late 1960's popular culture.

Though sinister, there is humor in the film and we explore the destruction of human minds with a sense of irony. It seems, in fact, that Conrad's metaphor for the complexities of the human mind has been extended to a direct study of these very complexities: The detailed study of human suffering is almost embarrasing. Already long before we propperly explore the concepts of madness, however, we laugh at the obscurity of Lt. Colonel Bill Kilgore's logic and, in the redux version, his nearly naïve affection for his surfboard.

But what is new in the 1992 redux? An almost absurd scene with former French colonialists that have raised their own army to fight for a right to live in what they regard as their homeland. Indeed they are the "former colonizers, who to a certain extent are natives too" that Brazillian literature analyst Bonnici commented on. The absurdity of this scene, with the burial, the dinner with wine and white table cloths and the widow gives a new dimention to the film - one that ties it more tightly together with Conrad's novel.

In the Redux, we also get to explore Kilgore's obsession for his surfboard and, as a change for the worse, he is altered from a tragic character to a clown; a simple source of humour. A few other scenes have also been added but cannot be accredited any significant change.

When it was launched in 1979 Apocalypse Now became a widely discussed subject. The excessive use of drugs by the crew, and therefore excessively long production time, became a issue of morale. Also, ethical implications of the fact that the helicopters used in the film were rented from an army at war and, thus, were flows back and forth between fighting and filming, were discussed. In the end, Coppola paid for the production personally, underlining his artistic affection for the project. A more significant controversy, I believe, is the ethics of filming the sacrifice of a real water buffalo - the very painful partial decapitation. Whether this adds depth or realism to the movie, as Coppola argues, is insignificant and perhaps it lowers the director to the moral level of sadistic field commanders. Isn't the water buffalo as innocent as any Vietnamese civillian?