Taken as a whole Francis Ford Coppola's Palm D'Or winning masterwork Apocalypse Now is one of the greatest cinematic experiences ever produced. With an all-star cast, crackerjack filmmaking technique, an extraordinary literary pedigree and a legacy of spectatorship standing alongside the finished film Coppola's picture isn't just a movie so much as it's a cultural benchmark.

Though the film exists in various forms, each with a differing overall length and ending and including the 2001 release of Apocalypse Now Redux, it has also impacted three different decades of moviemakers and movie watchers while supporting fans devoted to speculation about unseen outtakes and the trivia of its production history. In part this stems from the filmmaking circumstances that were well documented in Eleanor Coppola's 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse. On the other hand part of the joy and frustration of the film is in viewing the release print and realizing how it appears like a compromise between the demands of commercial movie exhibition in 1979 and the culmination of some 16 months production spent largely in the Philippine Islands.

First released to heaps of acclaim and denunciation Coppola's Vietnam drama has been the focus of movie aficionados concerned with rumors of excised scenes. This fanaticism likely began the moment the movie's original lead, Harvey Keitel, was fired and replaced by Martin Sheen in the first few weeks of principal photography. Afterwards the planned six-week production schedule blew out to well over 250 days and started to closely embody traits of the American War in Vietnam. Among them was a gross disregard for budgetary constraints, natural calamities like hurricanes and storms and the idiosyncrasies of personnel as well as the exigencies of moviemaking with a superstar like Marlon Brando working alongside such '60s mavericks as Dennis Hopper. But there were also considerations like an ever-changing script, the evolution of the project and Coppola's hubris in wanting the finished film to encapsulate the entire American experience of Vietnam in one totalizing story.

Naturally the size of Coppola's ego and the ambition supporting his film divided critics and dismayed certain viewers even as it amazed them all with technical brilliance. Few would dispute the achievements of Oscar-winning cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, production designer Dean Tavoularis, editors Lisa Fruchtman, Gerald B. Greenberg, Richard Marks and Walter Murch and sound designers including Murch along with Richard Beggs, Mark Berger and Nathan Boxer. Still others would single out the performers like Robert Duvall, Martin Sheen, Brando and Hopper who made the film a high water mark for their previous and subsequent works.

Critics of the finished work generally describe Apocalypse Now as being emotionally impenetrable, overlong, grandiose and a rather empty experience. In fact many would even contend it has very little to do with the Vietnam War as its over subject but is much more closely devoted to filmmaking and the mythology surround filmmakers, Coppola most especially.

Owing to this confusion and common division in spectators mulling over the finished text, certain excised scenes were eventually added to the film's narrative for its re-release at the Cannes Film Festival of 2001 under the title Apocalypse Now Redux. Running some 40 minutes longer than the original film and supposedly produced according to Coppola's founding vision, this newest version advances some of the more confusing aspects of the 1979 release print and introduces other material that was rightfully left on the cutting room floor. What remains through all this artistic genius, thematic audacity and metaphorical storytelling is a kind of murder mystery.

To those who readily discount the achievement of the 1979 original, very little in the 2001 version will persuade them of anything otherwise. To those who already treasure Coppola's movie the added footage extends some of that picture's strengths but also interrupt it with some interesting, though ultimately faulty, new directions that seem like footnotes to the film rather than part of its purpose.

Beginning with Captain Willard (Sheen), an amoral man eager for action within Vietnam's harsh circumstance, the young operative is assigned to kill a rogue Army Colonel named Kurtz (Brando) who has set up a kingdom complete with his own militia. To assist his task he's put on board the boat of Chief Phillips (Albert Hall) who is assigned with getting Willard to Kurtz's settlement with no questions asked.

On Phillips's boat Willard gradually integrates himself in to the daily lives of its crew consisting of Hicks (Frederic Forrest), Johnson (Sam Bottoms and Mr. Clean (Laurence Fishburne). Together they experience all the now cliché-ridden vignettes of Vietnam.

Their first misadventure is Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) who transports their boat into the right river tributary for their mission using his helicopters but not before assaulting a VC village and surfing in the South China Sea. Further upriver they massacre a boatload of traders and then happen upon a USO show complete with three Playboy Playmates. The show goes awry so they continue past a demolished bridge with constant fire fights, past the stranded USO show members trying to get back to civilization, through an ambush that kills Mr. Clean and beyond a sojourn at a French plantation colony. Finally arriving at Kurtz's compound, Phillips and Hicks are murdered, Johnson is integrated with the native people and Willard is made captive until Kurtz allows him certain liberties.

Having long understood that the army would try and kill him, Kurtz has erected a guerilla force of such ferocity he's simultaneously considered a god and devil. Facing this duality Willard witnesses Kurtz's madness in the surroundings that include a photojournalist (Hopper), numerous children and decapitated heads in effigy to fallen foe. The two men strike up an uneasy bond to comprehend their shared surreal environs but they remain separate from one another with regard to their goals and loyalty.

With the Doors song "The End" pulsing on the score, Willard enacts his mission from army headquarters. He approaches Kurtz during a feasting celebration and kills him with a machete before retreating from the guerrilla settlement with Johnson in tow and calling in a napalm strike.

Eventually produced for $31.5 million, much of it provided by Coppola himself as the production slid farther and farther behind its production schedule, the movie went on to a domestic gross $78 million with a rentals return of $38 million. Not a hit by the usual standard of low cost to high revenue ratio it was, instead, a cultural event that affirmed Coppola's place among the filmmaking elite and introduced certain stock images into the visualization of the Vietnam War.

Importantly Coppola's script, co-written by John Milius with some dialogue provided by Michael Herr and all of it based on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, was derived from the perspective of telling the entire Vietnam story using but a scant few characters. There is the historical placement of European influences and failure through the French plantation. There is the confused purpose of the highly funded, expertly trained and effective American military. There is the backdrop of native peoples trammeled by war's incursion on peaceful lives and of course there is the twinned dynamic of madness and rationality in the face of wartime experience.

Apocalypse Now's production history was similarly troubled by many of the very same furies and acting like a close artistic metaphor. It relied on the participation of outsider influences but namely in Ferdinand Marcos's army to supply helicopters that were sometimes withdrawn from set to put down Philippine rebels. It was subject to the foibles of its stars in that Sheen suffered a heart attack during filming and Brando accepted a $1 million advance but threatened to back out before eventually showing up for the film late, 80 pounds overweight and ignorant of the script or Conrad's source novel. Then there were the troubles of Coppola as the central creative force in the film who was nearly bankrupted and who lost 100 pounds while producing the film while making suicide threats all the way through principal photography.

Altogether the trivial notes and history of Apocalypse Now are as rich as the finished film and act as yet another reason why its fans continue to support it. Thus it's now known how Fishburne lied about his age to accept his role as Mr. Clean when he was 14-years old. Or how Linda Carter was cast as one of the Playboy Playmates but had to withdraw to the changing production circumstances. Or how Sheen's character was named after co-star Harrison Ford's two oldest sons, Benjamin and Willard.

Of course there are the legendary moments within the finished film that made it from the sets and drug binges of the Philippines onto the big screen. Moments like Kilgore's napalm and victory speech, the lively river banter of Phillips and his crew, the out-of-control USO show, the horror of the bridge sequence and Willard's rise from ooze to kill Kurtz. When combined with the Sheen voice-over, jungle setting, overwhelming physical beauty and the ultimate failure of Vietnam to yield itself up to complete American domination, Apocalypse Now becomes a complete metaphor for waste, indifference, situational morality and war.

Those Hollywood-styled Vietnam movies made before and after are force through sheer force of artistic intention to deal with Coppola's groundbreaking film and risk coming up short. To the extent certain pictures come up even like Oliver Stone's Platoon testifies to their smaller focus and less operatic delivery. To those films that fail in comparison like the vigilante inspired Rambo and Braddock movies the looming greatness of Apocalypse Now is like an asymptotic limit beneath which inferior work founders.

Remembering that Kramer vs. Kramer won the Best Picture Academy Award for 1979 I'm left with the loser's battle of saying Coppola's film was rather significantly slighted at the Oscars ceremony. That's not to say Robert Benton's prizewinner isn't without its merits. Instead I believe Apocalypse Now is that kind of movie which is viewable in changing circumstances as a Vietnam drama, an action film, a spectacle of filmmaking excess, a fantastic aesthetic experience and as a literary metaphor for journeying down the belly of madness. I can't say the same for Benton's movie, even though I do admire it, so I'm left to promote the idea that the '70s were Coppola's decade with the two Godfather pictures, The Conversation and scripts for The Great Gatsby and Patton among other works.

But I will concede that Apocalypse Now is an oftentimes-difficult film to watch. Not so much because it's particularly graphic, boring or tells an overly complex story. Instead I acknowledge how it's ambition to cinematically inscribe the entirety of the Vietnam experience into a single film using Conrad's source plot and nearly four-hours running time is a taxing proposition for virtually every enthusiastic spectator. Furthermore I acknowledge how the film seems intended to debunk the mythology of First World military incursion into Third World circumstance yet it also relies on spectacles of military action, atrocity and gallows humor to orient the resulting film. I'm a fan of Apocalypse Now. I have been ever since I first saw it in two sittings staring at a widescreen TV that played a letterboxed laser disk copy of the film.

I have never wavered in this position especially once considered through the lens of its production history, not simply for its subject but also because of its principle contributors. Thus it stands as an even more impressive piece of art because it ground through the same kind of excesses, troubles and demands that were part and parcel of the American War in Vietnam.

I recommend Apocalypse Now to anyone with an interest in cinema as an art form and who would be open to the treasures of Hollywood auteur filmmaking. Coppola's film is at once entertaining, inspiring and aesthetically masterful while also being one of this county's outstanding cultural achievements.