A couple of years ago Frosty and I went to see APOCALYPSE NOW REDUX. As we waited for the film to start, I glanced around and was surprised to see virtually no women, children, teenage boys, or young men in the theater. The place was packed with men ranging in age from their late thirties to their late fifties, many of them wearing military boots, camouflage jackets, and tie-dyed bandannas, the whole platoon seething with anticipation while they talked knowingly among themselves about cool scenes they could remember from when they first saw APOCALYPSE NOW twenty-five years earlier.  Just before the lights went down, I leaned over to Frosty and whispered, "What've we gotten ourselves into? I thought this was supposed to be an anti-war film."

I soon learned that in APOCALYPSE NOW, Francis Ford Coppola depicts the military as a menagerie of fools and madmen, and war as a prolonged LSD trip that's alternately comical and horrible but always psychedelically beautiful and much more intense and meaningful than everyday life. Atrocities are portrayed as though they were works of art.  When Martin Sheen sees corpses hanging from the limbs of trees as his boat approaches the riverbank, the scene is visually poetic, as carefully composed and sickeningly gorgeous as one of those Medieval triptychs depicting the torments of Hell.

Flaubert believed in art for art's sake and felt that artists have no obligation whatsoever to be ethical. Flaubert would have loved APOCALYPSE NOW, but he also would have howled with laughter if you tried to tell him it's an anti-war film. Coppola's portrayal of Nam as the ultimate drug experience, the ultimate dementia, the ultimate dark epiphany is well designed to be seductive rather than cautionary.

Elem Klimov's COME AND SEE is set in Byelorussia during World War Two, but otherwise it's remarkably similar to APOCALYPSE NOW. Klimov uses exactly the same style of hallucinatory black comedy. As COME AND SEE moves toward its conclusion, the main character, a dimwitted 14-year-old farm boy named Florya, wanders deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness, just as Martin Sheen does when he travels upriver to find Marlon Brando's little kingdom in the jungle. And like Sheen, Florya is more a stunned observer of war than a participant in it.

Florya is played by Alexei Kravchenko, a youth who had no previous experience at acting when Klimov selected him for the part. When the story begins, Florya's face resembles the face of Alfred E. Neuman, the "What, me worry?" boy in Mad, but by the end he has the gaunt, tormented, profoundly traumatized countenance of one who has witnessed genocide. To achieve this transformation, Klimov had a professional hypnotist put Kravchenko into a deep trance before certain key scenes were filmed.

The other main character in COME AND SEE is Glascha (played by Olga Mironova), an attractive young woman who befriends Florya and journeys with him. In some of the earlier scenes, especially one when she dances in the rain, Glascha has the look of a classic hippie flower child from San Francisco's Summer of Love. Her face seems to melt from one expression into another rather than changing in a normal way, leading me to suspect that Klimov may have provided Mironova with an ample supply of LSD, just as Coppola reputedly did for Sheen and the rest of the cast and crew during the filming of APOCALYPSE NOW.

At the start of the story, we see Florya and a younger boy digging around in a spot where soldiers are buried under a few feet of sand. Florya desperately wants to find a rifle so he can join a group of partisans and help them defeat the Nazis who have invaded his homeland. Florya is so eager to fight he can hardly stand having to wait around until the storm troopers arrive in his neck of the woods.

Soon enough, both of Florya's wishes are granted. He unearths a rifle. And the storm troopers arrive.

Like Coppola, Klimov depicts the military as fools and madmen, and the horrors of war as preternaturally exquisite works of art. Nearly all the peasants in the ragtag band of Byelorussian partisans that Florya joins look goofy and ridiculous and impotent in their makeshift uniforms, more like hobo clowns than heroes. By contrast, the Nazi storm troopers are big, strong, handsome, immaculately groomed sadists, a master race of insane demons who snicker and guffaw at their victims. In one scene, the storm troopers slobber with glee, cavort merrily, and give themselves rounds of applause as they lock the entire population of Perekhody inside a wooden meeting hall at the center of the village, taunt them with insults, then burn them alive. Thus the drab, mundane awfulness of slaughter is romanticized into a grotesquely festive carnival of horrors. When a cow is felled by tracer bullets, the closeups that show her dying on the ground are esthetically ravishing, and a running glimpse that Glascha gets of naked corpses heaped against the side of a building has an eerie, misty, almost unearthly beauty.

Above all else, COME AND SEE is vibrantly psychedelic. The superficial message is that war is absurd and hideous and obscene. The underlying message, implicit in the movie's pervasive psychedelic coloration, is that war is a mind-blowing blast, a trip, a rush, a visionary experience more intense than anything else could possibly be.  Somehow, I don't think the tens of thousands of villagers who died in Byelorussia in 1943 saw it that way.

My dislike for this style of war movie puts me in the minority. COME AND SEE won the Grand Prize at the Moscow Film Festival. Novelist J. G. Ballard has declared it the greatest war film ever made. Critic Walter Goodman calls it "a moviemaker's tour de force." According to actor Sean Penn, "What I saw will stay with me forever . . . It's a masterpiece not only of filmmaking but of humanity itself." The most revealing tribute, however, comes from reviewer Ron Wells: "I was ready to kick some German ass after I endured this picture."