|
Review
|
Brilliant but erratic film, suffers from undue
self-absorption near the end, as if the fact that it
thought it was important was enough to be important. Sheen
plays a military officer assigned to locate a Colonel Kurtz,
an army intelligence agent who has organized his own army
in the interior and is conducting campaigns of
unprecedented savagery against the enemy. Dramatic
incidents on the journey highlight the corruptibility of man
and the insanity of war. Somewhere lurking in the mess is
the idea that evil can only be confronted with evil, but
it appears that Coppola realized that the simple
articulation of this idea doesn't necessarily involve a huge
epiphany. The problem is that the Sheen character, the
focus of the audience's interest in Kurtz, doesn't tell us
what he thinks when it really matters. And Kurtz, mumbling
vaguely allusive semi-poetic phrases, doesn't illuminate
very much either. The filming itself, in Thailand, became a
major story after Sheen suffered a heart-attack and the
sets were plagued with natural disasters.
|
