10 War Films That Broke All The Rules
7. Apocalypse Now
Okay, so this is a little bit of a chicken and egg situation, but Come and See's viscerally unsettling and deeply surreal vision of war wouldn't have been possible were it not for the outsized influence of Bram Stoker's Dracula director Francis Ford Coppola's inventive, hypnotic Apocalypse Now.
A sort-of adaptation of Joseph Conrad's nightmarish adventure novella Heart of Darkness, Coppola's film transplants the story's action from British imperial invasion of the Congo to America's neo-imperial invasion of Vietnam, but the underlying themes and attendant tension remain the same.
Unlike the traditional war movie, our hero here has no idea what he's doing in Saigon (or even how long he's been there), and his picaresque trip through the country only serves to illustrate the war's pointless, bloody folly.
From a chaotic, creepy USO show, to a surf-obsessed soldier who opts out of the conflict in favour catching waves, to tiger attacks and eventually the grim spectacle of Marlon Brando's madman Kurtz, everything about Apocalypse Now is strange, wrong, and designed to subvert the normalisation of war. Here, war is a bizarre nightmare, one America has caused itself and now can't awaken from.