FRANCIS Ford Coppola's humongous war odyssey Apocalypse Now (Pearl, 9.30pm, original running time 153 mins) turns Vietnam into a cross between high opera and a massive acid trip.
The story, based on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, is simple: a war-drunk special forces captain (Martin Sheen) is sent up river to wipe out renegade colonel (Marlon Brando, totally incomprehensible) who's set himself up as god to the jungle natives and is waging his own war in Cambodia.
But, the film is more complex - a mind-bending journey into mesmerising, surreal encounters. Witness, the lunacy of Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) who enthuses ''God I love the smell of napalm in the morning'', while leading a helicopter fleet into battle to the thunderous strains of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyrie ; or the USO show, with its over-blown, sex-leaden atmosphere as Playboy bunnies gyrate in a steamy jungle location.
Then, there's the eventual encounter with Kurtz and his skeletal subjects, and the heart-stopping (if confusing) climax, when Coppola inter-cuts the pulsating drum crescendo of a sacrificial dance with the Sheen/Brando showdown.
The nightmare of making such a movie is revealed tomorrow in Eleanor Coppola's documentary film Hearts of Darkness (11.50pm, ORT 96m).
AFTER a two-week delay for translation into Cantonese for NICAM viewers, the CBS news magazine Eye to Eye with Connie Chung (Pearl 8.30pm) will definitely begin today, we are told.