Apocalypse Now and Apocalypse Now Redux (and don’t you just hate it when those talking heads pronounce the ‘x’?) are two different versions of the same essential plot. You can compare them all day, but you must appreciate that fact. Now, for some opinionating! 
AN is less disturbing, for one thing, not only because it shows less, but because it doesn’t bring up quite as many apsects to the plot. The plantation scene is an example of that. Here you have the French, relics of a bygone age, fossils from Vietnam’s colonial history, desperately holding ground against … what? The Vietnamese? They’ve lost that war. Communism? They know that war is a lost cause as well. No, they’re holding the line against the future, and acting as Cassandras for the Americans. Their desperation should be our lesson: Get out, turn back, there cannot be victory down this path! But in the movie, as in the war, the American pushes on, blindly following orders to his doom.
The next scene I want to bring up is the added Playboy scene. It is NOT just t-&-a. It is a rather biting commentary on just how depraved the people have become, and how far they have traveled from sanity. For example, after the model knocks over the barrel containing the body, the only thing she cries about is how people have always made her do things she didn’t want to do in her modeling carreer. The soldier is completely unaffected, both by her and the body. Add to that the Louisianan’s fetish for one bunny to the extent he makes another one wear the wig so she looks like her and you get a disturbing tableau which to me was about as erotic as a morgue.
Then you have the bridge. The psychadelic nightmare of a military bungle. The bridge is meant, I think, to symbolize the war at that point: A group of soldiers without commanders, insanely following meaningless commands so a distant government can save face. The ‘shooting at nothing’ scene is particularly telling: How can you fight an enemy that can fade into any city, any village, any jungle? The paranoid soldier, blindly firing at phantoms of his imagination, represents a paranoid US Armed Forces, desperately trying to kill fleas with a .45 Magnum (or trying to kill VC with napalm and high-altitude bombing raids).
The extra Kurtz scene was good. Kurtz, throwing all of those magazines promising a quick end to the war at Capt. Willard, is a particularly effective scene and a good example of how the US government slowly sold the US people on the stupidest war of the century. Kurtz lived through that lie for years, giving up everything, his career, his family, his friends, everything, to pursue a place in the special forces (Green Barets or the Airborne, I think, but I could be wrong) to serve his country. Remember, he authored a paper on how we could win the war by helping the people. The government and the VC both proved him wrong (the ‘diamond bullet right between the eyes’ quote), the government by fighting the war as a complete mess, the VC by chopping off all of the arms his men had innoculated.
And now we get to the essential point of the story, as I see it. Kurtz saw the VC as the perfect soldiers. Moral, disciplined, intelligent, but completely without remorse when it comes to war. His goal was to fight the war his way, with his kind of soldiers. But what kind of human can shut off his remorse as he cuts an arm off a six-year-old? When you can do that, you are no longer human. You are Homo sapiens sapiens, the most dangerous animal on Earth. ‘Apocalypse Now’ was his motto, a threat of what a war his way could accomplish. His final line, ‘The horror, the horror … ,’ was the last gasp of the human in Kurtz seeing what the inhuman in all of us could do. Kurtz was not evil, any more than the tiger that tried to eat the saucier was evil. Kurtz was a representation of the amoral, Nature Unbound, and the horror of life without moral cosequense.
AN and ANR are two of the few films that can affect me emotionally and intellectually at the same time. I love both, and I think either can stand alone.
