APOCALYPSE Now came 13th in Channel 4's Best 100 Films Ever Made list last weekend. Would Apocalypse Now Redux finish higher, lower or in exactly the same unlucky-for-some 13th place. I vote for higher. Even if the 49 minutes of previously unused footage do not add up to brilliant scenes in themselves, they broaden the epic vision, they complete the picture.

What's more, Francis Ford Coppola's newly revised and extended 1979 anti-war movie - re-released in a kind of 12-inch version - is topical anew with America at war once more on unfamiliar terrain in the East.

Afghanistan is a war in motion, not yet in emotion. By comparison, when Coppola made Apocalypse Now, America was still trying to make sense of the Vietnam conflict. In his case, he set Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness in the madness of a Sixties war when Peace was all the rage.

He charts the journey up river from Saigon into deepest Cambodia of an already spooked Special Forces captain, Willard (Martin Sheen), with a drugged-up crew. His mission is to "terminate without prejudice" Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) who, part Macbeth, part Machiavelli, is fighting his own private war in mad exile.

That journey still gives Apocalypse Now its rhythm, its exhilaration and exhaustion, but what of the newly re-instated scenes?

Footage of the navy patrol boat near the start of its journey adds little; an expanded Playboy playmates scene gives more emphasis to Coppola's point about everyone becoming mere meat in war; the new Brando scene enhances the director's anti-lie message. Most important, in Coppola's opinion, is the long plantation sequence, in particular the seduction scene with Aurore Clement. The dialogue is banal, the music the only bad choice in the soundtrack, and yet it still provides contrast to the bloody hell all around it.

Re-edited, re-thought and unburdened by the emotional collateral damage that went with making this extraordinarily ambitious work in the late 1970s, Apocalypse Now remains an epic folly: film-making on the grandest, maddest and most bold scale, with its sentiments and film-making practices founded in Sixties counter culture.

Today we have special effects to help the water-borne likes of Kevin Reynolds's Waterworld and James Cameron's Titanic. In the late 1970s, Coppola had to make do with imagination, determination to conquer the elements and, so it is said, the resourcefulness of a good apothecary.

On top of that, he was dealing with the mountainous ego of Brando and tackling head-on America's recurring nightmare: the Vietnam War (which can never be won by the Americans, no matter how often modern Hollywood's history re-writers - Coppola aside - would wish it so).

Truly they don't make them, or re-make them, like this any more.