Every once in a while, there comes a film which ends up becoming a landmark for the medium and a yardstick on which other films are going to be rated against. They become a cultural symptom and ensure that the very approach of films is not going to be the same henceforth.

Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now does exactly the same especially for the classical notion of Hollywood war movies. Based of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and following a narrative about Captain Benjamin L. Willard’s (Martin Sheen) journey into remote areas within Cambodian forests to exterminate an insane and rogue officer of the US Army named Colonel Walter Kurtz played by Marlon Brando. From here on the film starts ascending new heights steadily brushing aside the usual war movie elements and ends up as an opera of anguish unfolding itself in hell.

While the three hour long run time was often criticized for making the film a slow march through the expected horrors of war, this comparatively slow pace of the film allows the audience to take a deeper look into a space, the most significant site of political comment of our times, to realize the seeds of terror sown in there. Horrors, which get manifested through scenes like American choppers bombarding villages with Wagner’s music playing or the sudden demolition of a little fishing boat by the Navy patrol vessel or the final sequence of sheer violence accompanied by Brando’s ominous monologue.