[REVIEW] Apocalypse Now Redux
There’s a substantial body of people who would argue that Apocalypse Now is the very best movie made about the Vietnam War. I’m not inclined to disagree with them, especially since I can’t think of any Vietnam film I like better. I only hold back because Apocalypse Now isn’t so much about Vietnam as it is about the horror and futility of war in general. But more on that in a minute.
I would say there’s no question Apocalypse Now is the most epic of all Vietnam films. There is no movie quite like it; one that combines a dreamlike atmosphere with a few intense warfare moments and an all-out mind warp in the final act. That final-act strangeness has a tendency to lose viewers, but that doesn’t mean it’s not as good as the rest of it, just different. The early happenings of the film are simply easier to process as war-movie stuff.
Even so, Apocalypse Now has been derided for being a self-indulgent sprawl of a picture, one that pales in comparison to its nominal source material, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. I would disagree with this assessment, but things are a little different when we talk about Apocalypse Now Redux.
A little perspective.
During the course of the Vietnam-related clusterfrick on Story Games, one of the more unbalanced members of the anti-Vietnam committee started posting images from the war designed to disturb and upset the rest of us. At least a couple weren’t even from the war at all, which is cheating more than a little bit, but the rest were fair inclusions.
Probably the most famous of the images he posted was this one:
Chances are pretty good you’ve seen this picture yourself somewhere and somewhen. It’s a powerful bit of imagery, perhaps even more so than the moving footage captured by an NBC cameraman at the same time. I’ve never seen someone being killed so matter-of-factly. It seems calculating, cold, but you know what? That’s not the whole story.
What I want to do in ‘Nam
I dare not cross-post this to Story Games for fear of another clusterfuck, so consider this is a blogging exclusive.
I tend to go through phases of interests much like, I suspect, we all do. Right now my interest has swung back into all things Vietnam, or at least those things related to the American war there. You’ve read my thought about replicating The Green Berets, now see what else I have on my mind.
The first thing I have kicking around is inspired by the film Off Limits, starring Willem Dafoe and Gregory Hines. Alternately titled Saigon in some venues, the movie is about two military policemen whose beat is that rough-and-tumble city circa 1968. By all accounts Saigon was a crazy place during the American years, packed with brothels and bars and shot through with black market sales and drugs. It has some of the traits, then, of a classic cyberpunk city, where crime simmers just below the surface and erupts with frequency.
Cop stories are easy to tell because they’re so often motivated by some crime. There’s been a murder. A GI has been accused of rape. Somebody’s dealing dope they bought from an unknown source in the city. A business is being shaken down for protection money. And so on.
It’s also possible to tell other stories in the same setting. Instead of playing the cops, maybe the players take on the roles of brothel owners, simple pimps, drug dealers, black marketeers and so on? Sure, these are more unconventional tales, but take a look at the story seeds above and see how they could be tweaked to a different perspective and become interesting all over again.
[REVIEW] Missing in Action
Remember a few years back when we had all those movies about underwater monsters/aliens/whatever come out at roughly the same time? Or when we had dueling Christopher Columbus movies? It happens all the time, these little bursts of parallel development, and it happened during a short stretch of the 1980s, too.
In 1983 we had the film Uncommon Valor with Gene Hackman. The story had to do with rescuing American prisoners of war still being held in Vietnam well after the war’s end. In 1985 we had Rambo: First Blood, Part II, in which the popular super-solder went back to Vietnam with the mandate of finding POWs. And in between these two pictures we had the Chuck Norris vehicle Missing in Action, which concerned itself with (you guessed it) rescuing POWs from Vietnam. Funny how these things work out. It’s doubly funny that First Blood, Part II was solely credited with the sort of story it told despite it having been told twice already, but that’s perhaps food for another entry altogether.
You’ll find a surprising amount of shared color in Missing in Action and First Blood, Part II, but that’s likely because both films concern themselves with superheroic soldiers doing their sworn duty to leave no man behind. For the most part they’re quite different, due largely to the difference in budgets between the movies. First Blood, Part II was a big-budget affair from a major studio, whereas Missing in Action is a product of the B-movie factory known as the Cannon Group.
