The Big Bang

To continue Bomb Week, we are gonna talk about the most famous example of C4 on screen.

Tyler Clark
July 20, 2023

Good morning Consumers. Good morning Consumers. This is please consume, film newsletter that loves movies more than Chris Nolan loves blowing sh!t up.

Apocalypse Now (1979)

To continue Bomb Week, we are gonna talk about the most famous example of C4 on screen.

A scene so famous it’s been parodied to death, even turning into a major plot point in Ben Stiller's comedic opus Tropic Thunder.

A movie that had such an infamous set that there is an equally good documentary made about it.

Today we will be discussing Francis Ford Coppola and his masterpiece, Apocalypse Now.

Pushing the Idea of Adaptation

When looking at Apocalypse Now, you can’t not talk about the novel it’s based on. Heart of Darkness is a novel written by Joseph Conrad published all the way back in 1899 about contemporary men paddling, not through Vietnam, but through Africa.

Although the book and film do carry similar themes around racism and xenophobia, have the Colonel Kurtz character, and take place on a river, they actually don’t share that much in common.

Heart of Darkness is about somebody who works in a shipping yard and is on the river to pick up and find ivory. The film is a commentary on Vietnam in the political climate of that time. Both may end up in the same place, but they take wildly different paths to get there.

The Nightmare of Making This Movie

This movie was damn near impossible to make.

It is stunning that it was.

They were over budget and behind schedule. Charlie Sheen was going crazy. He got drunk, sliced his hand open, and had a heart attack.

Then Marlon Brando shows up almost 100 pounds heavier than he’s actually supposed to be and Dennis Hopper was belligerent.

And Coppola was outright evil towards his crew. At no point in the production did they have an easy time; they had an actual war break out in the middle of filming.

The incredible documentary about the production is called Heart of Darkness, and is without a doubt one of the best documentaries you’ll ever watch on filmmaking.

The Big Bang

Arguably the most famous scene from the film was, at the time of filming, the largest explosion ever put into a movie.

Special effects supervisors Joe Lombardi and AD Flowers ignited 5,450 liters of gasoline in a 4-mile-long ditch, set to the Flight of the Valkyries as jets fly overhead as a deranged captain forces his soldiers to surf in order to block out the atrocities around him.

This scene packs a wallop and it’s understandable how it ended up lodged in all of our minds for the last 44 years.

Today’s Scene

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