A scene analysis of 'Apocalypse Now Redux' Part 1

This is a scene by scene analysis of 'Apocalypse Now: Redux'

Title 1 (6:06-18:53) (12:47) 

The film opens in a small room in Saigon. Captain Willard, of the U.S. Army’s Special Forces (505 battalion, 173rd Airborne , SOG Studies and Observation Group) and CIA operative is a wreck. He’s a government assassin without a mission, out of action, and the waiting and boredom are killing him. A couple of soldiers show up at his door with orders to bring him to COM-SEC INTELLIGENCE at Nha Trang Airfield.

There, a general hands Willard a mission. Walter E. Kurtz, a highly decorated Colonel, is wanted for murdering 4 Vietnamese double agents. He has since gone AWOL and made himself a god over an indigenous people called the Montagnards in a remote jungle in Cambodia. Willard and a crew are to travel up the Nung River in a boat, learn what they can along the way, and once they arrive in Cambodia, to find Kurtz and to kill him with “extreme prejudice.”

My viewpoint

At the beginning you see Captain Willards face and images of the war in Vietnam, fire, burning brush, helicopters, his wife’s picture on the table by his bed, bottles of Alcohol. Willard is an assassin for the CIA and he is disconnected from reality, disconnected from the world, his family, disconnected from himself. He’s disconnected from all the men he’s killed previously, disconnected because those men weren’t American. As Willard says in the film’s voice-over: 

“How many people had I already killed? There were those 6 that I knew about for sure... close enough to blow their last breath in my face. But this time, it was an American. And an officer!” 

Kurtz reconnects Williard with the reality of killing others because not only is Kurtz a U.S. Colonel and an American and Williard gets to know the man intimately through his dossier and by retracing Kurtz journey up the Nung River. This journey both detaches Willard to understand how Kurtz flipped and at the same time the journey reconnects Willard to his own humanity and reality after being desensitized killing foreigners.