Apocalypse tomorrow

Watching Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now Redux,” the director’s cut which contained a sequence not originally shown in Cannes, gave me a rather oblique hindsight on the state of the Philippine military in the 1970s.

The Hollywood director, who by then was already made  famous and a multi-millionaire by the critically acclaimed “The Godfather” trilogy, dared to invest his own savings for a logistically monstrous film about the Vietnam War that would be shot in the Philippines.

Coppola almost went bankrupt or had a nervous breakdown after going through several frustrations in the course of filming done for more than two years in Luzon, according to “Hearts of Darkness,” the documentary of the making shot by his wife Eleanor.

First, the U.S. military refused to cooperate with him, perhaps sensing that the film would only add insult to injury left by their recent defeat in the Vietnam War. So Coppola ended up negotiating with President Ferdinand Marcos, offering millions of dollars for rental of military equipment that would  be used in the film and salaries for soldiers, workers, and extras hired for assorted roles in the film production.

Marcos agreed on condition that the helicopters would be pulled out any time during emergencies, such as actual combat operations against the growing communist insurgency at that time (not to mention the risk of the choppers being shot down by guerrillas hiding in nearby mountains). Coppola agreed and began the huge and expensive task of moving people and equipment from his studio Zoetrope to the Philippine countryside.

Thus we see in the film the massive deployment of Philippine Air Force Huey and MG 520 helicopter gunships. Dozens of them dance in the sky like dragonflies spewing fire from rocket pods to nipa huts in rice paddies to the tune of Wagner.

A small formation of F5A jets flew by to fire napalm rockets at  a line of trees. These must have been part of the original 19 F5A jets, then state-of-the-art, that we acquired in 1966. Attrition rate was high for these jets in the following years and they were finally decommissioned a few years ago.

The film was a logistical wonder and it’s hard to imagine that all the advanced weaponry being displayed was actually sourced from a Third World country. The directorial precision in the way the images come together belies the actual problem of controlling the rented machines and hired personnel for their use in the movie.

Gathering such a large number of equipment before a film camera is expensive and the director must do whatever it takes to get everything within his control. However, there were times when choppers had to be pulled out in the middle of a  shoot to perform actual battle scenes against communist rebels.

These left the embattled Coppola almost losing all his money and his wits. But quitting was not a choice for the director.

“How can I quit?” he said. “I cannot say to myself, ‘Francis, I quit.’”

In the end, “Apocalypse Now” proved to be one of the most artistic and deeply philosophical movies of the Vietnam War ever produced by Hollywood. It became an iconic film of the period and made Coppola recover his loses and earn more feathers in his cap.

The film, whose narrative is based on Joseph Conrad’s novel “Heart of Darkness”, presents the moral ambiguities that soldiers face in real combat, a theme that would haunt Hollywood in later films about war.

But for a Filipino Martial Law baby watching it again, this time amidst China’s bullying of our weak military on the issue of the Spratly Islandss, it is not the usual spirit of pacifism that moves me but the rage over how we have allowed our former position of strength to be lost by years of corruption and inefficiency in the armed forces.

Watching  “Apocalypse Now”, we are awed by the sophisticated military hardware that even  Americans mistook for their own. Today, not much has changed in the kind of weapons used by our military since Coppola rented them in the ‘70s.

Our soldiers use the same rifles and helicopters seen in the film. The tanks and fighter jets have become museum pieces. And so, while neighboring nations threaten each other with a shooting war over islands we also claim for our own, we can’t help but sit back and curse ourselves as we wait for a possible Apocalypse tomorrow.