Welcome to our movie vs. book discussion for Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalyspe Now vs. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness! To catch up on our discussion on Heart of Darkness, visit the post.

For the movie, the first thing to know is that there are three significantly different cuts. The 1979 theatrical release is the shortest and it's the one critics tend to review, as here by Roger Ebert. Coppola released an extended cut, Apocalypse Now Redux, in 2001 that is 49 minutes longer. It restores several entirely cut scenes, including a long French plantation scene, a scene with two young Playboy bunnies being exploited at an abandoned medevac station, a scene involving monkeys piloting a sampan with a dead and castrated Viet Cong, and a scene of Kurtz reading from Time magazine. In 2019, Coppola released Apocalypse Now Final Cut. This version again cut the bunnies scene, part of the plantation scene, and the Time magazine scene.

A summary of the plot and a comparison of the versions can be found on Wikipedia.

I'm posting this right before bedtime here in California, so I hope I can get some sleep with these disturbing images in my head. For those of you in other time zones just waking up, well there's nothing like the smell of napalm in the morning!