Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now has rightly been described as hallucinatory it's an LSD-infused look at the Vietnam War, all colour and chaos, about mankind at his most mindlessly destructive. The film's opening shot could be a tactical strike seen through a confused drugs haze: We see trees. A helicopter flies before us. Yellow smoke begins to rise, almost covering the greenery in the background. It's uncertain what's immediately happening here. Then boom a payload of napalm instantly reduces the treeline to smoking trunks. Coppola pans to the right, showing us the additional devastation, but he shows us nothing more the fire-bombing is just as senseless all down the line. The shot begins as serene; by the end, it's pandemonium, choppers criss-crossing through the ochre smoke before ash-piles that were living things just a second before.