Francis Ford Coppola‘s legendary Vietnam epic, now with 50 extra minutes of footage. Only a restored sequence set in a French plantation truly enhances our understanding of the film As wonderful as it is to see Coppola‘s epic back where it belongs, Apocalypse Now Redux comes with a caveat. Whatever you might have heard about the 50 plus minutes of new footage, there‘s little here that qualifies as must-see material. A new scene with the Playboy bunnies, a bit more splashing about in the surf, bonus footage of Brando mooching about - as with the Star Wars special editions, you‘ll search out the new stuff rather than have the new stuff present you with a fresh take on the film.

There is one exception - the French plantation sequence, glimpsed in the excellent documentary Hearts Of Darkness, is so enlightening, it‘s hard to see how the movie worked without it. Besides providing Clean (Fishburne) with a send-off, the scene satisfyingly rounds-out the character of Chef (Forrest), who, as a New Orleans native, speaks French and is actually a chef. And in Christian Marquand‘s landowner, Hubert De Marais, we find the embodiment of why America‘s war effort is as stupid as it is doomed to fail. Of course, some will argue that adding more minutes to Apocalypse Now simply makes a big, pretentious movie bigger and more pretentious. But for all the film‘s indulgences, it‘s still the small moments such as Lance (Bottoms) ‘burying‘ Chief (Hall) that remain the most powerful.

And if Apocalypse Now is what happens when a filmmaker reaches too far, we can only hope that i) more directors follow suit and ii) Coppola stops wasting time on trivia like Jack and gets back in the boat he never should have got out of.