Very few movies manage to be relevant, or to show us something about life that makes us want to re-engage from our comfortable armchair debt servitude, and very few do it so insightfully and elegantly that they might be “classics,” but this film surely qualifies.

Ostensibly a war film, it re-tells Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in a Nietzschean take informed by the civilization collapse riffs of T.S. Eliot, set in the Vietnam war to symbolize the ongoing interaction of the West with the third world.

Instead of the usual hoorah nonsense we receive instead a meditation of the deepening of descent into both crisis and an escape from the mental poison of civilization, hitting on many of the themes of black metal which Conrad carries on from Plato.

Its peak may be the infamous sampan scene where means-over-ends reasoning collides with ends-over-means, a moral critique echoed in the final scenes, where an escape from social morality provides the characters a means of going forward, even if scarred by the past.

While it is criticized for its intense nihilism and seemingly depressing theme of the ongoing failure of civilization in the West, its message to a metal fan offers the usual hope: if we can escape the mental pathology of civilization, we can rediscover the wisdom of nature and become participants in our own lives again.

Tags: cinema, francis ford coppola, john milius, joseph conrad, t.s. eliot