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Reviewing Apocalypse Now Redux for the Guardian, I pointed out that Vietnam is overfilled with language, but in Coppola's depiction of Vietnam, there are almost no words.

I wrote:

You may have noticed that I have so far mentioned no Vietnamese characters. That's because there are none. The only Vietnamese speaking part belongs to a south Vietnamese army translator, who gets to yammer: "This man is dirty VC! He wants water! He can drink paddy water!" This in a movie that Coppola famously declared "is not about Vietnam - it is Vietnam". This movie, then, is really about a bunch of pale guys, Coppola included, wading into their own hearts of darkness. It is certainly not about Vietnam. I'm not even sure it's a Vietnam war movie.

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As Willard's boat travels up the Nung river, the only signs of civilisation are two US army bases and, in the new extended version, a French plantation. This has nothing to do with the Vietnam of reality. As anyone who has been there will tell you, Vietnam is (and was during the war) grossly overpopulated. Rivers and roads are lined with settlements. The US, by comparison, is more wild. Another thing a visitor to Vietnam can readily see is the ubiquity of the written language - that is, of civilisation. Signs and banners are everywhere. None of this is apparent in any of the panoramic shots of Apocalypse Now. Coppola hasn't just withheld speech from the Vietnamese, he has also banned them from writing.

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