Apocalypse Now cinema re-release

I watched Apocalypse Now : Final Cut in the cinema last night and it was just fantastic. A film I've seen a lot but never on the big screen. It blew me away.

The first time I ever saw it was a long time ago in college. I'd heard about it, I'd read about it but now was my chance to see it. It was on CH4 in a pan & scan version and riddled with ads but it melted my head. It was a war film but it wasn't. It was an anti war film but had a scene that made war look exhilarating. It had the president from the West Wing looking very young and Kal-El from Superman looking very different indeed. I sat down expecting Platoon and got something very very unusual.

Last night we got something different again. The story stayed the same as 2001's redux edition apart from a few excisions (the second Playboy bunny scene got the chop thankfully. Seriously it's bad) but seeing it on a huge screen with surround sound and an appreciative audience made it all fresh again. You'd forgot how darkly funny some of it could be, Kilgore and the water canteen, Lance's descent into madness, Willard's grumpiness. How brutal it could be. The water buffalo. The river junk. Mr Clean dying as his mother's words poured out over his body. Or how scary it could be, the tiger and the head scene being two moments any horror movie would be proud to claim as their own. The Flight Of The Valkyrie scene of course had the audience buzzing. If ever a moment had to be seen on the biggest screen possible it's that one. Watching it all play out just blew my mind. The work that went into making it all happen. The realisation that everything onscreen, everything, had to be done practically, no cgi here.

Coppola was really fucking with the audience when he planned that scene. What is essentially an aerial attack on a civilian village is turned into an absolute spectacle, a scene of sheer amazement. You want to whoop and then you remember just what exactly it is you're watching and you feel like a scumbag. When this was being filmed back in the mid to late 70's Vietnam was still a fresh scar in the American psyche. Francis Ford must have known the reaction the public would have to this. 40 years later it's still having the same effect.

There's no point in saying anything else. The film has been talked into the ground, analysed to death. It's amazing. Getting to see it in the cinema was just magic. Getting to introduce a friend to it was excellent. Getting to see an audience fall in love with it once again just rocked.

Apocalypse Wow.