Apocalypse Now Blu Ray – Laurence Fishburne , Marlon Brando

Please note this is a region B Blu-ray and will require a region B or region free Blu-ray player in order to play.   Francis Ford Coppola’s stunning vision of man’s heart of darkness revealed through the madness of the Vietnam War. Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) receives orders to seek out a renegade military outpost led by the mysterious Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando). Willard’s mission: “Terminate with extreme prejudice.” One of the most powerful films of all time, Apocalypse Now was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won Two for Best Sound and Best Cinematography. Based on the novel, ‘Heart of Darkness’ by Joseph Conrad. Includes early performances by Harrison Ford and Laurence Fishburne. This is the Blu-ray premiere of one of the greatest films ever made! From revered director Francis Ford Coppola and starring Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen, Harrison Ford and Dennis Hopper, this film is a must for any Blu-ray collection Presented in a deluxe 3 disc digi pack edition with the feature, redux and feature length behind the scenes documentary Hearts of Darkness, original press notes and artcards.     Actors Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall, Frederic Forrest, Sam Bottoms, Laurence Fishburne, Albert Hall, Harrison Ford, Dennis Hopper, G.D. Spradlin, Jerry Ziesmer, Scott Glenn, Bo Byers, James Keane & Kerry Rossall Director Francis Ford Coppola Certificate 15 years and over Year 1979 Screen Widescreen 2.35:1 Languages English  

Francis Ford Coppola’s multi-million dollar war epic, accompanied by the 1991 documentary which chronicled its making, and the updated 2001 director’s cut. In ‘Apocalypse Now’, US Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) is sent on a mission to assassinate Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a renegade American officer who has set up his own kingdom in the heart of the jungle at the height of the Vietnam war. Willard’s journey begins with a devastating aerial assault on a small Vietnamese village, the attacking helicopters booming Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyrie’ out of their speakers, and becomes progressively more deranged as it moves up the river. ‘Apocalype Now Redux’ (2001) is a new cut of the Vietnam epic, with director Francis Ford Coppola adding 55 minutes of deleted scenes. ‘Hearts of Darkness’ (1991) chronicles the troubled making of Coppola’s epic. Filming began in February 1976, but problems on location included illness, clashing egos (Brando turned up on set – to the tune of three million dollars a week – overweight and unwilling to learn his lines) and cast changes (Martin Sheen replaced original choice Harvey Keitel halfway through). By the time shooting was concluded, Coppola had gone $31 million over budget. Fortunately, his wife Eleanor was on hand to capture the chaos on film as a warning to aspiring directors everywhere.

In the tradition of such obsessively driven directors as Erich von Stroheim and Werner Herzog, Francis Ford Coppola approached the production of Apocalypse Now as if it was his own epic mission into the heart of darkness. On location in the storm-ravaged Philippines, he quite literally went mad as the project threatened to devour him in a vortex of creative despair but from this insanity came one of the greatest films ever made. It began as a John Milius screenplay, transposing Joseph Conrad’s classic story “Heart of Darkness” into the horrors of the Vietnam War, following a battle-weary Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) on a secret upriver mission to find and execute the renegade Colonel Kurtz(Marlon Brando), who has reverted to a state of murderous and mystical insanity. The journey is fraught with danger involving war-time action on epic and intimate scales. One measure of the film’s awesome visceral impact is the number of sequences, images and lines of dialogue that have literally burned themselves into our cinematic consciousness, from the Wagnerian strike of helicopter gunships on a Vietnamese village to the brutal murder of stowaways and the unflinching fearlessness of the surfing warrior Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall), who speaks lovingly of “the smell of napalm in the morning.” Like Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God, this film is the product of genius cast into a pit of hell and emerging, phoenix-like, in triumph. Coppola’s obsession (effectively detailed in the riveting documentary Hearts of Darkness, directed by Coppola’s wife, Eleanor) informs every scene and every frame, and the result is a film for the ages. –Jeff Shannon