Apocalypse Now voted best film of the last 25 years by Brits:
- In a poll organized by the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound magazine, the 1979 epic beat Martin Scorsese's "Raging Bull" into second place and Ingmar Bergman's "Fanny and Alexander" into third.
"Apocalypse Now deserves its position for being a richly complex, madcap experiment in war film-making that comes off because it never falls from the tightrope it walks between extravagance and profundity," Sight & Sound editor Nick James said in a statement.
A panel of 50 British film experts were asked to consider 259 films made between 1978 and now.
Makes sense to me, the film has a strange, dark, enduring power; and I agree with the Nick James statement about a tightrope, but I see the walk between objective and subjective reality. As the viewer assumes various characters' subjective experience of of the narrative, jolts of objective reality - usually in the form of violence - snaps the character and the viewer into a broader, "neutral" perspective. Though the story is not, this tone is true to Conrad.
Article comments
1 - Ed Driscoll
Eric,
Interesting comments about Apocalypse Now. In case anyone's interested, I wrote about the film myself on Blogcritics, a couple of months ago.
Ed
2 - pk
Thanks for picking that up Eric. I wrote a longish response to this which spins off other musings about the film and Coppola...and other things related to film adaptations of classic literature; it's too long to post here. If you're interested, it's here.
Cheers!
Pieter