Face-Off: Zero Dark Thirty vs. Apocalypse Now

An Army special ops officer is recruited to track down and kill a colonel who overtime has gained a cracked mind and gone rogue. He accepts, and witnesses the horrors of the war he’s landed himself in, he loses comrades, and almost his sanity as he travels through a Cambodian river before finally finding his target who is now ruling over his own troops in neutral territory. By the time he finds Kurtz, we are taken on a journey with everything that contributed to turning this man insane. It’s like the film was daring us not to lose our own heads.

When we meet Ben Willard he appears to already be a broken man. Our first glimpse of him he is drinking and trashes his room, my typical Friday night. Anyway, despite all of this the man has a sense of duty and ultimately accepts the mission he was picked for. It understandable given all the things Willard goes through that he’ll be mentally and emotionally thrashed, it amazed me that when the time came he managed to go through with his mission. After all that, the possibility of falling for Kurtz’ philosophical ideas was plausible. But nope, Willard must succeed.

Before we meet Kurtz we discover that he was a decorated officer who was well on the way to receiving more credentials than he already had, and the mystery behind what caused him to throw all that away was a brilliantly appealing. When we do finally meet the man, his compound is surrounded by decapitated heads, and if he sees you as a threat we see how quick he is to chop your damn head off too. Kurtz is compelling, he eventually releases Willard and explains to him where he is coming from and praises the Vietcong he now surrounds himself with. Because of these newly adopted ideals, the US wants him stopped. The mans mind was indeed just not there, another brilliant turn from Brando.

Roger Ebert wrote in his review, “”Apocalypse Now achieves greatness not by analyzing our ‘experience in Vietnam’, but by re-creating, in characters and images, something of that experience.” Spot on Roger spot on. Other critics praise the film the same way by commending its way of deconstructing the soul and portraying the terror of Vietnam. It has also sparked debate on whether the film is pro-war or anti-war, I don’t think its either I think it just…is. The film holds an overall approval rating of 99% and earned about $150 million in the box office.

Apocalypse Now was a brilliant film, almost enough said. But I of course have to say more. The shots were beautiful, the war scenes were brutal, the cast was perfection, and it did the same thing Zero Dark Thirty did in confronting us with our humanity…only it seemed to do that throughout the whole movie. Memorable and iconic lines abound, and its legacy as possibly the greatest war film to date is not a fluke folks. It was surreal journey and every time I see it, it sticks with me for at least a week. To think of this film not ultimately winning this match up…”oh, the horror.”