Apocalypse Now (1979) on Netflix
Captain Benjamin L. Willard is handed a mission that officially does not exist. Up the Nùng River, he must eliminate Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, a Green Beret leading his own army.
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Trailer
Plot summary
In 1969, during the Vietnam War, Captain Benjamin L. Willard, a veteran assassin on his third tour, is called to Nha Trang for new orders. Officers there brief him on Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, a Special Forces officer who has been running his own brutal campaign without permission. Kurtz holds a remote outpost in eastern Cambodia, where American soldiers, Montagnard fighters and local Khmer militia serve under him. Willard is ordered to terminate the colonel's command with extreme prejudice. He joins a Navy patrol boat under Chief Phillips, with crewmen Lance Johnson, Jay 'Chef' Hicks and Tyrone 'Mr. Clean' Miller, to travel up the Nùng River. At its Viet Cong-held mouth, Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore's helicopter cavalry mounts an air assault to open the way, a favor Kilgore grants after learning that Lance is a well-known fellow surfer.
Cast
- Kerry Rossallas Mike from San Diego
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Apocalypse Now (1979)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Steve McQueen was Coppola's first choice to play Willard, but McQueen did not want to leave America for three weeks and Coppola was unwilling to pay his $3 million fee. Al Pacino was also offered the role but turned it down, afraid of falling ill in the jungle as he had while shooting The Godfather Part II.
- Typhoon Olga wrecked 40-80% of the sets at Iba and production closed down on 26 May 1976; some of the crew were stranded in a hotel, and the destruction of the Playboy Playmate set ruined a month's scheduled shooting.
- Within a few days Francis Ford Coppola was unhappy with Harvey Keitel's Willard, saying Keitel "found it difficult to play him as a passive onlooker". Keitel left the project in April and Martin Sheen replaced him, arriving in the Philippines on 24 April; only four days of reshoots were reportedly required.
- Marlon Brando was paid $2 million for a month's work on location as Kurtz in September 1976, and also took 10% of the gross theatrical rental and 10% of the television sale rights, earning him around $9 million.
- Coppola says Kurtz was loosely based on Special Forces Colonel Robert Rheault, the actual head of 5th Special Forces Group, whose 1969 arrest over the murder of a suspected double agent in Nha Trang made public the phrase "terminate with extreme prejudice", used prominently in the movie.
- Real human corpses were bought for the film from a man who turned out to be a grave-robber; the police questioned the crew and held their passports, soldiers took the bodies away, and extras were used to pose as corpses instead.
- A water buffalo was really slaughtered with a machete by a local Ifugao tribe for the climactic ritual; because such scenes filmed in the Philippines were not policed under American animal cruelty laws, the American Humane Association gave the film an "unacceptable" rating.
- The film is credited with creating the Philippines surfing culture around the town of Baler, where the helicopter attack and surfing sequences were filmed.
