Worth staying up for this one

I stayed up way past my bedtime last night, but the film I watched on DVD was worth it.
"APOCALYPSE NOW" was the result of FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA and JOHN MILIUS relocating JOSEPH CONRAD'S "HEART OF DARKNESS" from the Congo to wartime VIETNAM.
I was struck by the power of the film when I first saw it in the cinema decades ago.
Last night's DVD viewing so many years later did nothing to dim my appreciation.
The cast is great, Coppola is a great director and the film's premise is intriguing: A special operations officer (MARTIN SHEEN) is dispatched deep into Indochina to kill a renegade Special Forces colonel (MARLON BRANDO).
Sheen's character reaches the renegade's camp, but realizes his prey might not be as insane as their superiors had presumed.
One of my favorite pieces of dialogue by Brando's character, Col. Walter E. Kurtz, describes an earlier event he witnessed during the war:
"We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember... I... I... I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out; I didn't know what I wanted to do! And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it... I never want to forget. And then I realized... like I was shot... like I was shot with a diamond... a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God... the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand that these were not monsters, these were men... trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love... but they had the strength... the strength... to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral... and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling... without passion... without judgment... without judgment! Because it's judgment that defeats us."
Sure, he sounds a little crazy, but he's probably also correct.
Film's that play like satisfying, complicated novels are worth the missed bedtime.