This is the big one. Francis Ford Coppola's overblown 1979 Vietnam fantasy has gained 49 minutes of footage after the director bunkered down in the editing suite with seven tons of original film stock. It now runs to more than three hours. Pick a cinema with comfy seats.

The plot should be familiar enough. Willard (Martin Sheen) is a special forces assassin charged with the job of journeying upriver into the Cambodian jungle in search of Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) - another spook who has gone mad while commanding a rag tag army of primitive Montagnard tribesmen.

But by the time Willard's patrol boat reaches Kurtz's compound, hung with rotting corpses and thick with malaria, madness has taken over and the certainties of the Saigon-based generals have faded into the jungle.

Back in 1979, Coppola was staring at the wrong end of a three year production schedule, a 15-month location shoot that had pushed cast and crew to the brink of madness and nearly cost leading man Sheen his life, and a US$16 million overspend financed from his own pocket.

Perhaps it's understandable that he decided to play safe and pander to the pressure to try to make a "normal" war film. So material which distracted from the basic up-river narrative drive was left on the cutting room floor in the fear that it would turn audiences off.

The re-edited Redux restores some of those lost scenes, widening the film's original themes as the director pulls his lens back to take in the wider picture. In doing so, he's also made the picture sharper.

Instead of a film about a boat trip, this is now more explicitly a journey into the heart of darkness and the loss of innocence at the heart of modern war.

It's been completely re-edited, but four extra scenes add most of the new muscle. There's another encounter with the Playboy Bunnies, drawing parallels between them and Willard's crew as innocents abroad. There's more on surf-crazy Cavalry officer Colonel Kilgore, increasing the boat crew's camaraderie and the film's Catch-22 sense of the absurd. Far upriver, Willard's encounter with a widow from a marooned French plantation gives a last glimpse of humanity before the hell of Kurtz's compound, and a glimpse of what he could be outside the war. Finally, Brando gets more on screen time to brood and taunt Willard over his war's ultimate failure.

It's more complex than before, but also funnier, more tragic, more satisfying. It actually feels shorter. Even the notoriously overblown ending, the ritual sacrifice of the god/king Kurtz lifted from the pages of mythology compendium The Golden Bough (seen during the movie on Kurtz's desk), actually makes more sense in the light of what has gone before.

Coppola has said he didn't feel audiences were ready to take this vision back in 1979. But maybe audiences have changed since then. Maybe Coppola was wrong to cut so much footage in the first place. Nearly 23 years on, it's time to get back in the boat.