A New 'Now'

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Image credit: Apocalypse Now Redux: Mary Ellen Mark

MORE KILGORE ''Redux'' resurrects a borderline slapstick segment that Coppola felt would play as tastelessly comical with 1979 audiences. ''We had to make it more of an action adventure film at the time,'' Coppola says. Now it plays like ''Catch-22'' as napalm intoxicated Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) escalates his bombing assault to ludicrous heights in search of the perfect wave, while Willard and surfer Lance (Sam Bottoms) abscond with the colonel's board, knocking fellow soldiers around like the Three Stooges.

BOAT BACKGROUND There's more footage establishing the naïveté of Willard's shipmates Chef (Frederic Forrest) and Clean (Laurence Fishburne), and some rearranging makes their progression from innocence to decadence clearer.

SOGGY PLAYMATES The Playboy bunnies from the concert riot scene show up again at a rain drenched medevac station, where their own manager pimps them out to Willard's companions. Clean is the grunt who doesn't get any nookie -- which helps explain his trigger happy behavior later in the movie.

TIME FOR TIME Kurtz imprisons Willard in a tin hut as he reads a magazine story aloud.

Of course, there's plenty more footage Coppola shot that's still not in the expanded ''Redux,'' including a subplot involving Scott Glenn as Colby, one of Kurtz's zombielike acolytes. Murch insists none of this material will show up in the supplements to an upcoming DVD edition. The sole potential bonus, says Murch: audio outtakes from Brando's rambling monologues as Colonel Kurtz. Here's hoping they include the immortal, oft parodied outtake ''I swallowed a bug.''

Originally posted Aug 13, 2001

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