Apocalypse Now

(1979)

Kurtz (Marlon Brando)

"We must kill them. We must incinerate them. Pig after pig. Cow after cow. Village after village. Army after army, and they call me an assasin! Well what do you call it when the assasin's acuse the assasin?"
"I've seen horrors... horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that... but you have no right to judge me. It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face... and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies. I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate the children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember... I... I... I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized... like I was shot... like I was shot with a diamond... a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God... the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters. These were men... trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love... but they had the strength... the strength... to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral... and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling... without passion... without judgment... without judgment. Because it's judgment that defeats us."
"We train young men to drop fire on people. But their commanders won't allow them to write 'fuck' on their airplanes because it's obscene!"
"I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream. That's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor, and surviving."
"The horror ... the horror ..." (Kurtz' last words)

Willard (Martin Sheen)

"Saigon, shit. I'm still only in Saigon. Every time I think I'm gonna wake up back in the jungle."
"I hardly said a word to my wife until I said yes to a divorce."
"Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins they gave me one."
"How many people had I already killed? There was those six that I know about for sure. Close enough to blow their last breath in my face. But this time it was an American and an officer. That wasn't supposed to make any difference to me, but it did. Shit... charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets in the Indy 500. I took the mission. What the hell else was I gonna do?"
"Oh man, the shit piled up so fast in Vietnam you needed wings to stay above it."
"The machinist, the one they called Chef, was from New Orleans. He was wrapped too tight for Vietnam, probably wrapped too tight for New Orleans. Lance on the forward 50's was a famous surfer from the beaches south of LA. You look at him and you wouldn't believe he ever fired a weapon in his whole life. Clean, Mr. Clean, was from some South Bronx shithole. Light and space of Vietnam really put the zap on his head. Then there was Phillips, the Chief. It might have been my mission, but it sure as shit was Chief's boat."
"Never get out of the boat. Absolutely goddamn right. Unless you were goin' all the way. Kurtz got off the boat. He split from the whole fuckin' program."
"They were going to make me a major for this ... and I wasn't even in their fuckin' army any more."
Willard: "Who's in charge here, soldier?"
- Infantryman: "Ain't you?"

[Dialogue and action intervene.]

Willard: "Soldier, do you know who's in command here?"
- The Roach: "Yeah." [Turns away from Willard, the scene ends.]

Kilgore (Robert Duvall)

"You either surf or you fight."
"Charlie don't surf!"
"You smell that? Do you smell that? Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for twelve hours. When it was all over I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' dink body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like ... victory."

Chef (Frederic Forrest)

"Why do all you guys sit on your helmets."
- "So we don't get our balls blown off." (Soldier)
"He's worse than crazy, he's evil!" ("He" referring to Kurtz)

Lance (Sam Bottoms)

"Disneyland. Fuck, man, this is better than Disneyland!"

Photojournalist (Dennis Hopper)

"There's mines over there, there's mines over there, and watch out those goddamn monkeys bite, I'll tell ya."
"One through nine, no maybes, no supposes, no fractions. You can't travel in space, you can't go out into space, you know, without, like, you know, uh, with fractions - what are you going to land on - one-quarter, three-eighths? What are you going to do when you go from here to Venus or something? That's dialectic physics."
"He (Kurtz) likes you because you're still alive."
"This is the way the fucking world ends. Look at this fucking shit we're in man. Not with a bang, but with a whimper. And with a whimper, I'm fucking splitting, Jack." This is a variation on TS Eliot - "This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper".

External links:

Apocalypse Now at Rotten Tomatoes

Apocalypse Now at IMDb