Sheen makes the bigger impression now

Based on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the film tracks the journey of Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), a US Army intelligence officer sent up river into Cambodia to terminate the renegade Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando).

This time around, though, the trip is even more incident-packed thanks to the insertion of two extended sequences.

The first is another encounter with the Playboy playmates, a trio of Odyssean sirens who provide Willard's drug-addled crew with a brief respite from their hazardous mission.

The second involves a sojourn at an isolated French plantation, where Willard has dinner with a group of stubborn colonials before spending the night with a young widow (Aurore Clement).

You also get more Brando for your buck towards the end of the film.

The result is a languid, thoughtful work which forsakes the forward momentum of the more action-oriented original.

What it boasts instead is a poetic grandeur and moral complexity that were only hinted at 22 years ago.

Back then it was Brando who dominated. It was his face that appeared on the poster, and his charisma cast a looming shadow over everything that preceded his 11th hour appearance.

Interestingly, though, it is Sheen who makes the bigger impression now - perhaps because his conflicted hero seems more in keeping with our own uncertain times.

"I love the smell of napalm in the morning. Smells like... victory," says Robert Duvall's Colonel Kilgore in one of writer John Milius's most memorable lines of dialogue.

But the victory is really Francis Ford Coppola's for creating a revised Apocalypse that, while not necessarily an improvement on the original, is unquestionably its equal.

Apocalypse Now - Redux is on general release from 23 November.