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.
Lover of film, writer of words, pretentious beyond belief. Thinks Scorsese and Kubrick are the kings of cinema, but PT Anderson and David Fincher are the dashing young princes. Follow Brogan on twitter if you can take shameless self-promotion: @BroganMorris1
