EASILY one of the finest war films ever made, if not one of the finest films of any kind, Apocalypse Now just got longer.

Some 22 years after the original version was released, director Francis Ford Coppola has gone back to the raw material and re-cut the film, adding nearly an hour's worth of previously unseen footage.

Amazingly, what could have been a fruitless exercise in self-indulgence has actually been a resounding success.

The story is the same - in Vietnam, 1968, young US Army captain Willard (Martin Sheen) is sent up-river to kill renegade Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) who has established a jungle outpost in neighbouring Cambodia - but it has been considerably fleshed out in Coppola's new version.

We learn more about the background to the war in a scene set on a French plantation in Cambodia. The pivotal village assault sequence is lightened by showing Willard's escape, and Brando reading Time magazine to the imprisoned Willard adds a new perspective on war in general and Vietnam in particular.

But the film remains as operatic as ever. Immense in both ambition and scale - not to mention length (it's 200 minutes) - Sheen, Brando and Robert Duvall are superb, as is the support cast, including Laurence Fishburne,

Dennis Hopper and a tiny part for Harrison Ford. NICK CHURCHILL