Apocalypse Now - All the Versions

A brief intro: this film uses a story much like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to examine what happens to people when they move beyond the morality they understand, adopting that of a culture they perceive as more powerful in certain ways, but whose moral center eludes them. A “civilized” man “goes native” and, becoming a savage, loses who he knew himself to be. It’s also a scathing indictment of military thinking, and the insanity of war. I’ve seen all 3 versions of Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now: the original cut (1979) twice, then Apocalypse Now Redux, his second cut (2001) also twice, and recently, the “Final Cut” version (2019), which film buffs will recognize as a misnomer. 

This film cost Coppola and his cast and crew more than its blown out budget, more than the notoriety of making it – it cost Coppola his sense of proportion. At some point, an artist has to let the work alone – it’s out, it’s done, move on. “Final” cut? Probably not – Coppola has long been obsessed with this film. The epic took so much out of its participants that maybe he feels he owes it to all that footage to include it. I disagree. If Werner Herzog can brilliantly winnow 200 hours of Timothy Treadwell ranting about the US Forest Service while he treats grizzly bears as humans in bear suits (and pays with his life for that illusion), down to the 2-hour Grizzly Man, I think Coppola could have let well enough alone. 

I appreciated aspects of the Redux version: giving Marlon Brando more time on screen, bringing the movie resolution. I didn’t need the Bill Graham/ Playboy Bunnies USO show – it was OK, but did the story need it? Debatable. The section in which Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen) encounters a French plantation and its armed and determined family who declare Vietnam to be their home, for which they will fight and die and kill Vietnamese intruders, seems to be stretching a point. Is the purpose to teach us about Dien Bien Phu? To remind us that long before the US sent “advisers” to the country in the late 1950s, the French had established a colonial state there, which they were unwilling to cede to its natives? I found this section, first appearing in Redux, to be a distraction, even more so in the much longer Final Cut version where Willard shares an opium pipe with a Frenchwoman (Aurore Clement) and has an idyllic night – I thought of McCabe and Mrs. Miller and was disappointed by Coppola’s borrowing. 

Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) in Final Cut gets much more screentime for his surfing obsession, cocky sense of command, and the annihilation of villages. The point was well made in the original – I didn’t need more of his bluster and arrogance, nor even more footage of rows of palm trees going up in flames, Hueys swarming, nor the ridiculous pursuit of Willard on the patrol boat to retrieve Kilgore’s stolen surfboard. I really didn’t need that. 

The extended jungle scene of Final Cut in which Willard and Chef (Frederic Forrest) go looking for mangoes, was good – I really got a feel for these Americans in a totally alien environment, afraid all the time. The glimpse of an unexpected peril underscored the absurdity of the entire American misadventure in Southeast Asia. 

In the original, Brando’s screentime was brief – as the reason for Willard’s journey it needed more weight, and in Redux Brando received his due. But the Final Cut version beat a dead horse: I didn’t need Willard’s drawn-out imprisonment in a bamboo cage, being lectured by madman Dennis Hopper (in the role he was born to play) – in Redux we got all we needed of Kurtz’s camp, the ubiquitous dangling corpses and disembodied heads. I didn’t need more more more of that. The end was the same – Willard terminates Kurtz with extreme prejudice. Taking the hand of LB Johnson, the still-childlike surfer, to lead him back to the now crewless patrol boat, was enough. 

Here’s my compromise, Mr. Coppola: You can keep the USO show in the movie, but ditch the French plantation, and keep Kilgore and Brando to their Redux footage. That makes the film shorter than the Redux version (OK with me!!). Final Cut felt like piling on – the points had already been powerfully made. Shoving them at us repeatedly dulled their impact.

Wild Dark Shore, by Charlotte McConaghy

This 2025 novel is vividly told through the voices of its characters. The Salt family, Dominic (a widower) and his 3 children, son Raff (eighteen), daughter Fen (seventeen), and son Orly, (nine) are the last people on Shearwater Island, a dot in the southern ocean halfway between Australia and Antarctica. They’ve been here seven years – Orly remembers no other home. Though the weather is harsh, the island supports an abundance of plant and animal life. A seed bank repository has been built here, to save for replanting by survivors after climate apocalypse has devastated the planet. 

But sea level is rising rapidly, the seed vault built into permafrost is warming, and the family labor to save what seeds they can. A scientific group made lists prioritizing those to be salvaged, but by the time this novel opens, only the Salt family remain. A ship will come collect them and what seeds they’ve been able to remove from the drowning vault – but that arrival is weeks away and they have no communications. Their radio tower was sabotaged by someone on the island, so the ship crew have no notion of what has occurred. Down to their last rations – food, fresh water, fuel, dying batteries – the Salts live a spartan existence filled with hard work and awful secrets. 

Into their lives, then, comes a woman from the wreckage of a small boat whose pilot died. Fen, living in a boathouse at the beach surrounded by seals and penguins, sees the flotsam, swims out, and pulls in Rowan, who should be dead but insists on surviving. How her arrival catalyzes each family member’s griefs, and how their love changes her, drive the story. 

It’s well-told, unfolding a bit at a time, grounding readers then shifting deeper. Chapters are short, alternating voices; through them we mourn not only the humans but the planet they love. These seeds have been selected for human survival – but what about Earth's co-inhabitants, plants and animals? Do they have no right to a future we have jeopardized? Young Orly, a savant, feels deeply how that question must be answered. And Rowan brings creativity, skill and determination to this haunted place, where the first human population slaughtered colossal numbers of seals and penguins, rendering their carcasses for oil till there were none left, then abandoning the rusty barrels piled at the scene of their enterprise. 

Tragedies and secrets whisper to every character – so much of themselves is buried on this storm-whipped island, the reader wonders what leaving will do to them. McConaghy puts us into frigid water, fierce wind, constant hunger, and the human drive to finish what tasks we are set. Partner to their love of Shearwater is dread of what returning to society will mean – and in what threatened place it will make any sense to start over.

Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer

I took my time reading the essays in this 2013 book by enrolled member of Citizen Potawatomi Nation, PhD botanist, Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology at SUNY, founder and director of Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, Robin Wall Kimmerer. In addition to these credentials she is a mother, and student of traditional ways of living with Earth and its creatures. 

She writes beautifully, and she writes of the truths we ignore at our peril: that we are part of nature, that we thrive with our co-inhabitants and suffer when we do them harm. “We need acts of restoration, not only for polluted waters and degraded lands, but also for our relationship to the world. We need to restore honor to the way we live, so that when we walk through the world we don’t have to avert our eyes with shame, so that we can hold our heads up high and receive the respectful acknowledgement of the rest of the earth’s beings.” 

She says, “In order to live, I must consume. That’s the way the world works, the exchange of a life for a life, the endless cycling between my body and the body of the world… How do we consume that does justice to the lives that we take?” 

“Collectively, the Indigenous canon of principles and practices that govern the exchange of life for life is known as the Honorable Harvest… I am a student of this way of thinking, not a scholar. As a human being who cannot photosynthesize, I must struggle to participate in the Honorable Harvest. So I lean in close to watch and listen to those who are far wiser than I am.“ 

In a later essay, she observes, “The circle of ecological compassion we feel is enlarged by direct experience of the living world, and shrunken by its lack. Had we not worked waist-deep in the swamp, had we not followed muskrat trails and rubbed ourselves with soothing slime, had we never made a spruce root basket or eaten cattail pancakes, would [her students] even be debating what gifts they could offer in return? In learning reciprocity, the hands can lead the heart.” 

This book is an avenue into a way of thinking whose time is urgently at hand. If we do not soon learn to live with earth and its creatures – plants, animals, rocks, streams and all – as partners, we will die alongside them. Earth itself will continue, but as a host for life, may go dormant for an age. We don’t have to do this, to our home and to ourselves. Robin Wall Kimmerer is a wise woman – read, listen, and heed her words.