Watched Hearts of Darkness on laserdisc the other night, a documentary from the mid-1990s on the making of Apocalypse Now, which trigged a sudden Proustian rush of Apocalypse memories (and apologies to Woody Allen for that Stardust Memories allusion).

So here are some random, Apocalyptic thoughts:

1. If this film doesn't have the greatest audio ever recorded (the eerie 20th century classical synthesized rumble in the jungle can't separate the score from the sound effects soundtrack), it's right up there. I take it back--this has to be the greatest soundtrack ever recorded--Walter Murch is one the great technicians in Hollywood.

2. It's an astonishing looking film as well. Vittorio Storaro is a brilliant cinematographer, and Coppola was wise to get out his way and give him his head.

3. Coppola was savaged by many critics for the film's ending, but it's actually pretty amazing that he got what he got. Nothing like trying to salvage the climax to your film when your star (Martin Sheen) is coming off a heart attack; your other star is a typically out-of-control Marlon Brando, who shows up grossly overweight to play the emaciated Kurtz, and hasn't read Conrad's Heart of Darkness; and then you have Dennis Hopper, equally out-of-control, at the height of his drug, alcohol and who-knows-what-else addictions.

4. In some ways, Apocalypse can be seen as a negative image version of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Both were long, Homeric journeys into the unknown. But 2001 asked weighty questions, and delivered on both the answers, and the research done by Kubrick and Clarke. In Hearts of Darkness, a documentary about Apocalypse Now that's in many ways as good as its subject (but not yet available on DVD), Coppola is heard saying that for his films to not answer questions as to the meaning and outcome of the Vietnam War, it would have to be considered a failure.

In that respect, Apocalypse fails miserably, because it doesn't ask any serious questions, and it provides no answers. The Godfather films were far better at explaining the origins and implications of organized crime than Apocalypse Now for Vietnam (but of course, Mario Puzo wrote the novel for the Godfather. John Milius, Coppola and to a lesser extent Michael Herr (author of the brilliant new journalism-style take on Vietnam, Dispatches, who would later go on to co-write Full Metal Jacket for Stanley Kubrick) all contributed to the screenplay for Apocalypse, trying to salvage a Vietnam-era story out of Heart of Darkness.

Apocalypse Now doesn't make you think, it simply creates a powerful emotional state and allows you to become as spaced out as any of the soldiers on the boat. Not only that, but as James Bowman noted, not a single NVA soldier is shown. How do you make a war film--better yet, how do you set out to make the definitive film on a particular war, without showing its enemy?

In spite of all of that, though, Apocalypse Now is a brilliant achievement--a remarkably emotional film made under astonishing duress by one of America's premiere filmmakers of the 1970s. And watching 1997's The Rainmaker, with its flat, Hollywood-anonymous direction, reminds us just how far Coppola has fallen as a director--or perhaps just how timid Hollywood itself has become.