Four war-veterans, from different sides, step onto a boat at the mouth of the Kwando river, deep within the African interior. They are on a journey back to the battlefield, the site of the last "great" battle of the Cold War - its inconclusive and a very secret Armageddon, where they as youngsters, once tried to kill each other. But now, twenty years later, they've come together as former enemies, a new unit of disparate souls joined together not only by the common haunting of war trauma, but also by their need to understand, to reconcile, to forgive.
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Reviews
Truly Dreadful Film
Crappy film
Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.
The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.
This is no dry documentary and illustrates its artistic and cinematic credentials by the literary title and the reference to 'Apocalypse Now' with its Navy Patrol Boat on a journey upriver. Here the four veterans from different sides have to face the killing fields of their war in Angola. This is a staggeringly beautifully photographed cathartic journey through African landscapes and through an inner journey of painful war memories into their heart of darkness. As they move upstream memories return and horror stories of the reality of war are told around the camp fire revealing different attitudes to the need for "cleansing". The injustice and insanity of war are revealed but the psychological message is more complex to decipher. Does it reveal the true humanity of man or does it illustrate what the secretary of the US army Thomas E White said in 2002 when talking about the film 'Black Hawk Down' that 'it's about the man next to you, that's all there is'. I guess it depends on how you define the 'man next to you'.
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