'Apocalypse Now' lays the common phrase 'war is hell' to bare. Vietnam was a war fought on dubious grounds. Birthed during an era of hawkish US foreign policy that wrought destruction to mainly fill the pockets of corporate arms manufacturers and further indebt the U.S. government to private banking interests. It was a dark chapter that has since metastasized into worse things. The use of pop music in this film as an artistic mode is brilliant, it clearly conveys the normalization of killing as a recreational activity - the banality of evil. The movie reveals the idea that the Vietcong (VC) were created by the US as an elusive guerilla militant group - designed to be 'impossible to detect' for the very reason that they may persist indefinitely, for as long as the ruse was necessary - the casus belli (cause for war). The VC was a placeholder to create an excuse for the incredibly lucrative private sale of firearms, bombs, Agent Orange defoliant 'rainbow herbicides', missiles, military vehicles, and so forth. It enabled the creation of ensnaring government debt to private lenders, also. The bottom-line purpose was to create a persistent U.S. military presence in these Southeast Asian regions, which also enabled the opportune seizing of valuable natural resources. The movie ultimately is anti-war in its premise. At various points paradoxical aspects of the war are revealed, the cult of 'Apocalypse Now' headed by the 'insane' Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando) parallels the cult that was sent to destroy his - the U.S. Army itself, and those it was answerable to. Cap. Benjamin L. Willard (Martin Sheen) is the only properly trained soldier in his crew, he provides the point of view (POV); the sane looking glass by which the audience see the disaster that is the Vietnam war unfold before them. There is no point of moral authority in 'The Big Heat'; only chaos, only terror. This is where the film performs strongest, its screenplay is like a bad (artistic) trip on acid, with a political angle. Vietnam, for those years, was an adolescent soldier's playground, permissible by none other than the cult of the U.S. war machine. As Black Sabbath puts it; "Generals gathered in their masses, just like witches at black masses." 8.2/10

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