The first 10 minutes of Apocalypse Now are magnificent. My eyes were glued to every pixel on the screen. But following Captain Willard on his long journey from Saigon up a river to Cambodia where he is supposed to assassinate a U.S. general gone mad becomes tiring. The Redux version of the 1979 film is definitely too long. I have seen my share of Vietnam movies. This one is short on action and long on setting scenes like a painter would have. (I have never been to Vietnam and I found the landscape cinematography beautiful.) Apocalypse Now focuses on the psychological damage the war did on American soldiers. It does very little to explain why the American government got sucked into this war. The documentary The Fog of War is much better on this front.  You can skip Apocalypse Now but not the The Fog of War.