- A U.S. Army officer serving in Vietnam is tasked with assassinating a renegade Special Forces Colonel who sees himself as a god.
- It is the height of the war in Vietnam, and U.S. Army Captain Willard is sent by Colonel Lucas and a General to carry out a mission that, officially, 'does not exist - nor will it ever exist'. The mission: To seek out a mysterious Green Beret Colonel, Walter Kurtz, whose army has crossed the border into Cambodia and is conducting hit-and-run missions against the Viet Cong and NVA. The army believes Kurtz has gone completely insane and Willard's job is to eliminate him. Willard, sent up the Nung River on a U.S. Navy patrol boat, discovers that his target is one of the most decorated officers in the U.S. Army. His crew meets up with surfer-type Lt-Colonel Kilgore, head of a U.S Army helicopter cavalry group which eliminates a Viet Cong outpost to provide an entry point into the Nung River. After some hair-raising encounters, in which some of his crew are killed, Willard, Lance and Chef reach Colonel Kurtz's outpost, beyond the Do Lung Bridge. Now, after becoming prisoners of Kurtz, will Willard & the others be able to fulfill their mission?—Derek O'Cain
- In 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War, Captain Benjamin Willard is resting in his hotel room, waiting for a mission to be given to him by the United States Army. A mission that no one else has ever been given before. The mission is to travel upriver to assassinate a colonel, who's gone AWOL and acts like a demi-god to a group of tribal natives in the jungle. Taking the mission for what it is, Willard travels upriver along with a ragtag group of American soldiers, some of which are called by their nicknames. Along the way, several obstacles get in their way of the mission including a deadly encounter with a tiger and heavy enemy fire at a strategic bridge. As Willard nears the end of his mission, he soon finds himself reeling in the horrors and sanity of war itself as he confronts the colonel face to face in which Willard's true nature begins to emerge slowly.—blazesnakes9
- The worn out and fatigued U.S Army captain Benjamin L. Willard is sent on a harrowing and surreal mission into the deepest parts of the jungle during the height of the Vietnam War, with the objective of eliminating the rogue Walter E. Kurtz, a Green Beret officer who has completely lost his sanity. Together with a small squad of soldiers, Willard sets out by boat to travel upriver towards Kurtz' base. But Willard soon eerily realizes that the closer he gets to his target, the more he seems himself in him. Everything could happen on the mission, but one thing is clear; if successful, Willard will not return the same.—goddangwatir
- At the height of the Vietnam war, experienced soldier and covert operative Captain Benjamin Willard withdraws from a drunken and disheveled state to accept his most daring and secretive mission yet. His objective is to travel down the Nyung river by boat and assassinate a Green Beret Colonel named Kurtz who has gone insane deep within the Jungle, and leads his men and a local tribe as a god on illegal guerrilla missions into enemy territory. As Willard and the crew of a Navy PR boat unaware of his objective embark on their journey from the security of civilization into the untamed depths of the jungle, Willard confronts not only the same horrors and hypocrisy that pushed the level headed Colonel Kurtz over the edge into an abyss of insanity, but the primal violence of human nature and the darkness of his own heart.—redcommander27
- The story opens in Saigon, South Vietnam late in 1969. U.S. Army Captain and special operations veteran Benjamin L. Willard (Martin Sheen), has returned to Saigon on another combat tour during the Vietnam War, casually admitting that he is unable to rejoin society in the USA and that his marriage has broken up. He drinks heavily, chain-smokes and hallucinates alone in his room, becoming very upset and injuring himself when he breaks a large mirror.
One day two military policemen arrive at Willard's Saigon apartment and after cleaning him up, escort him to an officers trailer where military intelligence officers Lt. General R. Corman (G. D. Spradlin) and Colonel Lucas (Harrison Ford) approach him with a top-secret assignment to follow the Nung River into the remote jungle, find rogue Special Forces Colonel Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando) and "terminate his command with extreme prejudice". Kurtz apparently went insane and now commands his own Montagnard troops inside neutral Cambodia. They play a recording of Kurtz' voice, captured by Army intelligence where Kurtz rambles about the destruction of the war and a snail crawling on the edge of a straight razor.
Willard is flown by helicopter to Cam Ranh Bay and joins a Navy PBR commanded by "Chief" Phillips (Albert Hall) and crewmen Lance (Sam Bottoms), "Chef" (Frederic Forrest) and "Mr. Clean" (Laurence Fishburne). Willard narrates that the crew are mostly young soldiers; Clean is only 17 and from the South Bronx, Lance is a famous surfer from California and Chef is a chef from New Orleans. The Chief is an experienced sailor who mentions that he'd previously brought another special operations soldier into the jungles of Vietnam on a similar mission and heard that the man committed suicide. As they travel down the coast to the mouth of the Nung River, Willard's voice-over reveals that hearing Kurtz' voice triggered a fascination with Kurtz himself.
They rendezvous with reckless Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall), a commander of an attack helicopter squadron, the infamous 1st of the 9th Air Cav (Cavalry), who initially scoffs at them. Kilgore befriends Lance, both being keen surfers, and agrees to escort them through the Viet Cong-filled coastal mouth of the Nung River due to the surfing conditions there.
The next morning, Kilgore launches a brutal helicopter assault on the Viet Cong village amid air and napalm strikes on the locals and 'Ride of the Valkyries' playing over the helicopter loudspeakers, the beach is taken and Kilgore orders others to surf it amid enemy artillery fire. Kilgore nostalgically regales about a previous strike and reflects disappointed on how the war will end one day. Willard gathers the crew to the PBR, transported via helicopter, and begins the journey upriver.
During the long journey that occupies the bulk of the story, Willard sifts further through the Kurtz dossier, learning that he was a model officer and possible future general. Back in 1964 after returning from a tour of duty in South Vietnam, the 38-year-old Kurtz had eschewed the promotion, applying several times for Airborne training that he should've been too old to complete and had sent a report to his superiors about the war that was deemed classified. In other voice-over narration by Willard, Kurtz returned to South Vietnam in 1966 as a member of the Special Forces for another combat tour, which his fighting methods won victories against the enemy Viet Cong and North Vietnamese, but also drew criticism from his superior officers. By the late summer of 1968, Kurtz' combat patrols were coming under frequent ambush which ended in November 1968 after Kurtz ordered his men to summarily execute four high ranking South Vietnamese Intelligence officials who he suspected were double agents for the Viet Cong. Despite the fact that the four executed Vietnamese were indeed revealed to be double agents, the US Army charged Kurtz with murder for taking matters into his own hands instead of going through proper channels which resulted in Kurtz and his Special Forces/South Vietnamese army fleeing into Cambodia.
One evening, Willard accompanies Chef into the jungle to pick mangoes when they encounter a tiger. But they both make it back to the boat safely and continue on. Willard sees the tiger encounter and Chef's near-hysterical panic as a stern reminder of the rule to never leave the boat.
Another evening or two later, the crew visit a supply depot USO show featuring Playboy Playmates which goes awry when the servicemen attempt to assault the Playmates which the R&R to a quick end.
Some time later, the crew inspect a civilian sampan for weapons, but the strung-out Mr. Clean panics and opens fire, prompting Lance to open fire on the innocent Vietnamese family as well. Amid the supplies on the boat, Chef finds a puppy. Lance harshly takes it from Chef and keeps it as a pet. When Chef finds one young woman alive, Willard coldly shoots her to prevent any further delay of his mission. Tension arises between Chief and Willard from this moment on as Willard believes himself to be in command of the PBR, while Chief prioritizes other objectives over Willard's secret mission.
Another night later, the crew reaches the chaos of the Do Lung bridge, under attack by enemy forces.Willard also sees the lost side of the war: burned-out, stoned soldiers fighting a battle they are losing to keep the bridge open. As the PBR crew leave, the bridge is once again destroyed by enemy shellfire. As the boat continues up the river, Willard learns from another dossier brought to him by a courier that the missing commanding officer, Captain Colby (Scott Glenn), was sent on an earlier mission to kill Kurtz. He'd sent a scrawled letter back to his family telling his wife to give up any hope of his return. Due to the disturbing nature of the letter, the Army had told his family he was simply missing.
Lance and Chef are continually under the influence of drugs. Lance in particular smears his face with camouflage paint and becomes withdrawn. The next day the boat is fired upon by an unseen enemy in the trees, killing Mr. Clean and making Chief even more hostile toward Willard.
Another day or two later, the PBR is ambushed again, this time by Montagnard warriors as they cross the border into Cambodia, they return fire despite Willard's objections that the arrows fired on them aren't lethal. Chief is impaled with a spear and tries to kill Willard by trying to pull him onto the spearhead before dying.
Afterward, Willard confides in the two surviving crew members, Chef and Lance, about the mission and they reluctantly agree to continue upriver, where they find the banks littered with mutilated bodies. Arriving at Kurtz's outpost at last, Willard takes Lance with him to the village, leaving Chef behind with orders to call an airstrike on the village if they do not return.
In the camp, the soldiers are met by an American freelance photographer (Dennis Hopper), who manically praises Kurtz's genius. As they proceed, Willard and Lance see corpses and severed heads scattered about the temple that serves as Kurtz's living quarters and encounter Colby, who seems catatonic. Willard is bound and brought before Kurtz in the darkened temple, where Kurtz derides him as an "errand boy". Meanwhile, Chef prepares to call in the airstrike but is kidnapped. Later imprisoned, Willard screams helplessly as Kurtz drops Chef's severed head into his lap.
After some time, Willard is released and given the freedom of the compound. In another monologue sequence, the shadowy Kurtz lectures him on his theories of war, humanity and civilization while praising the ruthlessness and dedication of the Viet Cong: Kurtz had reached his breaking point some years before when he'd led a mission to inoculate the children of a small village for polio. Soon after completing that mission, Kurtz' unit was called back by one of the villagers where he found that the Viet Cong had come and hacked off every child's arm that had been injected with the vaccine. Kurtz morbidly admires the vicious dedication of the Viet Cong and the will they had to foil the efforts of his unit to help the villagers. Kurtz believed that if he'd had a large legion of men who would go to such extremes that he could end the war itself. Near the end of their time together, Kurtz discusses his son and asks that Willard tell his son everything about him in the event of his death.
That night, as the villagers ceremonially slaughter a water buffalo, Willard enters Kurtz's chamber as Kurtz is making a tape recording, and attacks him with a machete. Lying mortally wounded on the ground, Kurtz whispers his final words "The horror ... the horror ..." before dying. Willard discovers substantial typed work of Kurtz's writings (scrawled with "Drop the bomb Exterminate them all!") and takes it with him before exiting. Willard descends the stairs from Kurtz's chamber and drops his weapon. The villagers do likewise and allow Willard to take the near catatonic Lance by the hand and lead him to the boat. The two of them ride away in the PBR downstream to find help and safety as the Army tries to reach them on the short-wave radio. Willard turns off the radio. As Willard drives the boat away into the dark of the night jungle and in the pouring rain, the last words of Kurtz's "the horror... the horror..." echo in his mind.
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