The bitter taste of Coppola's new Apocalypse Now. 

Who could have predicted from the chaotic and despair-ridden shoot of Apocalypse Now (1979) in the Philippine jungles that a genuine masterpiece would, years later, emerge? No, it's not the new Apocalypse Now Redux, which is excruciatingly bad, but the 1991 psycho-documentary Hearts of Darkness, which looks even more brilliant in the light of Francis Ford Coppola's hapless rejiggering of his ever-unwieldy Vietnam War epic. Hearts of Darkness, directed by Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper (using on-set footage and diaries by Eleanor Coppola), remains the ultimate statement of the horror, the horror of making a big-budget war picture on grand, Conradian themes without a finished script. It gives the feverishly impotent Coppola a stature denied to the characters in his own film.

Well, that titanic Hearts of Darkness fool is still trying to scale Parnassus with a toothpick—and the wonder is how many of my colleagues have proclaimed his three-and-a-half-hour Apocalypse Now Redux a triumph. I'd like a hit of whatever they've been smoking. The restored footage, nearly an hour of it, has at once bloated and diluted the work we've known and half-loved, undercutting its still-astonishing strengths while making its flaws leap out with unprecedented clarity. You can now fully appreciate the job that Coppola and his colleagues did in 1979 of salvaging what might have been a dud on the order of … Apocalypse Now Redux.

Why did Coppola go back to his Bataan? Partly (ironically!) because Hearts ofDarkness gave people a glimpse of a discarded sequence set in a French plantation, and they were tantalized. In this age of DVD director's cuts and special editions, it's fun to see all the stuff that chickenhearted studios insist on excising. Except that Coppola, whose own money was on the line, had discarded these scenes himself, concluding—in a rare burst of good sense—that they weakened the film's already shaky (some would say nonexistent) structure. The other reported rationale for Redux is that Coppola sat through a 1999 screening of Apocalypse Now and found it too much like "a straight war movie." But if that's the case, it's only because it has proven so influential: Coppola's Vietnam is now, for better or worse, our Vietnam. Oliver Stone in Platoon (1986), Brian De Palma in Casualties of War (1989), and, in another war, David O. Russell in Three Kings (1999) took their cues and carried the rock-'n'-roll/psychedelia bombardments to more visceral levels. American war movies weren't like Apocalypse Now until Apocalypse Now.

Before we get to the added, largely terrible sequences, it's worth remembering the film as it has stood these last two decades. The good news is that it's still a blast to see the mostly unchanged first hour on a giant screen. Especially the trippy opening: the long line of trees, the swirling dust, the sound of chopper blades weaving in and out of guitar licks of the Doors' "The End," the sudden curtain of napalm, the fade from helicopter blades to a ceiling fan and the upside-down head of Martin Sheen (as Capt. Willard). The first line: "Saigon. Shit. I'm still only in Saigon." God, that beginning brings back a time. I was a college sophomore when I drove 200 miles to New York to stand in line for hours outside the Ziegfeld Theater, after a mentor (a worldly senior) had drawled in his West Virginian accent: "Y'know, there are two kinds o' people in the world—the ones who think Apocalypse Now is the greatest fuckin' movie ever made, and the morons. So which will you turn out to be, sport?"

It was hard to resist that kind of peer pressure, and some of the film actually turned out to be worthy of it. This was, after all, the first American, big-studio, counterculture war movie, and the Vietnam experience it portrayed was the bloody hallucination we'd read about in magazines and in Michael Herr's Dispatches—the one in which GIs massacred innocent civilians and one another, in which the arcs of multicolored tracer fire seemed "so lovely, so remote from anything that could harm you." Coppola, cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, production designer Dean Tavoularis, and sound designer Walter Murch made it their mission to depict the alienation of American soldiers from the landscape in which they fought. This wasn't The Green Berets (1968) or even The Deer Hunter (1978), in which the Vietnamese were the aliens, the ones who threatened our sacred way of life. The Yanks, with their radios and six-packs and drugs and USO shows, were the unnatural elements.

The Air Cavalry raid on a coastal village was (and still is) the movie's biggest coup, and not only because of Robert Duvall's hot-dog turn as the strutting psycho Lt. Col. Kilgore. Breathtakingly designed and edited, the sequence splits us in two: We cringe in horror at the coming of the helicopters to this quiet village with its flock of small children; we thrill to the choppers swooping out of the sun as Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" blares from the speakers; we cringe at the meaningless destruction; we thrill to the kick-ass marksmanship; we cringe at the sight of all the needlessly dead Vietnamese civilians; and then, when a Vietnamese girl tosses a grenade into a helicopter full of Our Boys, we thrill to see her strafed into oblivion. In few other battle scenes do our revulsion and love of kinetic spectacle so incessantly elbow each other aside.

Apocalypse Now takes our schisms even further: Its thesis is that America's inability to forsake the trappings of civilization—to "get out of the boat" in the movie's parlance—ensured its defeat. I'm more partial to Hendrik Hertzberg's related explanation, written on an anniversary of the fall of Saigon: that we lost because we weren't, as a nation, prepared to commit genocide. But the problem with Coppola's film isn't the thesis itself, it's that it tells you one thing (via Michael Herr's pompous narration) and shows you something else. The sinewy Kilgore actually fights the war, while the supposed war god Col. Kurtz (Marlon Brando) does little beside chop off native tribespeople's heads and crouch in semidarkness reading T.S. Eliot ("We are the hollow men/ We are the stuffed men …"). It was impossible, even in 1979, to keep from laughing out loud at the anticlimax that was Brando's Kurtz, the unplumbable dressed as plumber. Bathed in shadow to disguise his girth, Brando sat peeling and eating nuts while making raspy, echo-chamber-enhanced pronouncements like, "Horror and moral terror, you must make a friend of them, crunch," while Martin Sheen stared catatonically off-screen. What the hell happened to the end of the movie?

It had never been written. John Milius' original screenplay was full of his usual gung-ho macho posturing (only an asthmatic who had never seen combat could write such floridly jingoistic lines—his favorite characters sound like Conan the Barbarian), and the climax he'd come up with was a nihilistic battle that Coppola detested. The director didn't want blood-soaked exaltation, he wanted to pose the Higher Questions. It's not so hard to see why Coppola hit a brick wall, since he'd stopped grappling with the concrete realities of the Vietnam War and buried himself in Conrad's Heart of Darkness and such pointy-headed tomes as The Golden Bough and From Ritual to Romance. As Coppola puts it despairingly in Hearts of Darkness, his Kurtz needs to be "a character of a monumental nature who is struggling with the extremities of his soul and is struggling with them on such a level that you are in awe of it." And his last-ditch hope was that Brando would improvise that struggle with the cameras rolling.

This is, you understand, the Brando who admitted that he wanted to do the least amount of work he could get by with. The Brando who hadn't yet come to terms as an actor with his new obesity and rejected the only suggestion that might have saved his performance: playing Kurtz as an overstuffed, Gauguin-like voluptuary with a girl on each arm, eating and fucking himself to death. The Brando whose Method-spawned genius was rooted in the way he toyed in character with small, tactile objects, usually edible. A few years earlier, Coppola had stopped by the set of Last Tango in Paris (1972) and watched Brando, under Bernardo Bertolucci's guidance, dig deeper into himself on camera than he (and maybe any other actor) ever had. But focused improvisations on sex and food—both of which Brando knew intimately—are one thing; lofty ruminations on the meaning of Good and Evil are something else. In the outtakes included in Hearts of Darkness, you can see Brando scraping the bottom of his own banality. When Coppola prompts him to improvise on the theme of why humans are the only living things that kill for pleasure, Brando chews on a nut and says: "The human animal is the only one that has bloodlust. … Killing without purpose, killing for pleasure. …  [Pause] I swallowed a bug." The improv ends there, which is a pity: "I swallowed a bug" might have led somewhere interesting.

The restored footage, on the other hand, leads nowhere: Coppola has added back all the digressions he took out to streamline the journey upriver. Until it arrives at the fortress of the shadowy lump, the original Apocalypse Now has a satisfying trajectory, from the black-comic carnage of Kilgore through the movie's most inspired sequence—the acid-carnival anarchy at the bridge at Do-Lung. Now there's a scene in which Willard mischievously steals a surfboard from Kilgore: a different side of the stolidly wracked Sheen but not one that's developed anywhere else. The bit plays like an outtake—as do most of the semi-improvised dialogues among Willard's crew (Albert Hall, Frederic Forrest, Sam Bottoms, the 14-year-old Larry Fishburne). Worse, there's now an interval between Kilgore's mysterious, "Someday this war's gonna end," and narrator Willard's rumination on the sentiment, which here comes from nowhere. The extra hour does little to connect Sheen's dots. He still begins as a traumatized assassin and despairing puppet of the universe: He has nowhere, dramatically speaking, to go. He can't wait, he says, to confront Kurtz, but when he arrives at Kurtz's lair he has nothing to say to the man. He clams up. The draggy pace means there's more time than ever to wonder about the weirdly 19^th-century premise of sending Willard by boat through hostile waters when everyone else goes by plane and chopper. The Army wants him to gather intelligence on Kurtz, but Kurtz, in Willard's travels, goes conspicuously unmentioned. It's the dumbest excuse for a boat tour since Gilligan's Island.