Apocalypse Now is about Americans in Vietnam, and its themes are the perversion of the natural by the technological and the eerily sensuous beauty of war, in which the nightmarish all too easily becomes commonplace.

The images are not intended to be totally subjective or surreal; they are meant to illustrate the very real stages of demoralization—the rituals of defilement—that marked America's self-destruction in Vietnam. Apocalypse Now feels like one of those doom-laden pieces by the Grateful Dead that go on forever in a spreading luxuriousness of panic and dismay, leaving a residue of anxiety in your stomach while making you high at the same time. It's a two-and-a-half-hour acid-rock opera all in the same mood of ominously drifting horror, and finally it's just too pretentious. Like those sixties hipsters who boasted of their terrifying drug trips, Coppola is something of a show-off. He's eager to...