Apocalypse Now Essay

Apocalypse Now is a film produced by Francis Coppola in 1979 about the Vietnam war. The film was based off of the novel, “Heart of Darkness”, and is the story of an Army Captain, Captain Willard, and his mission to hunt down and terminate Colonel Walter Kurtz. The reasoning for sending Willard to kill one of his fellow Americans is due to the fact that Kurtz has become unstable and has been operating against his orders with the Montagnard army and committing murder. Kurtz has gone insane during the war and his methods are thought of as unsound and he needs to be taken care of.

The horrors of war were depicted by the constant threats to the characters lives, the brutal conditions of the bad weather, hunger and combat. Soldiers had to battle the enemy along with nature. Soldiers would become stressed, paranoid and start losing their personalities. As Captain Miller says, “I just know that every man I kill, the farther away from home I feel.” This quote shows the mental toll on these soldiers.

When Joseph Conrad sat down to write Heart of Darkness over a century ago he decided to set his tale amidst his own country's involvement in the African Congo. Deep in the African jungle his character would make his journey to find the Captain gone astray. Over eighty years later Francis Ford Coppola's Willard would take his journey not in Afica but in the jungles of South Asia. Coppola's Film, Apocalypse Now uses the backdrop of the American Vietnam War yet the similarities between the Conrad's novel and Coppola's film remains constant and plenty.

   Apocalypse Now is a very vivid and sometimes disturbing film centered on the Vietnam War. Because it was based on Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness, it is possible to draw some parallels between the two. Both can be interpreted as metaphors for a journey through the inner self, and each has its own singular message to convey. Apocalypse Now very perspicuously depicts the fact that men have hearts of darkness, and it explores the evils of war. At the same time, however, it seemingly glorifies some aspects. The anti-war sequences were often brutal and portrayed destruction as a result of the human condition. The film Apocalypse Now, directed by

The danger of the war and their age are not the only thing that creates uncertainty, our soldiers are uncertain of their presence in the war, and ultimately, their future. According the critic’s perspective, our involvement is a result of our government’s ideology, defender of the democracy, thus, the government determines what is “good and evil, right and wrong, civilized and uncivilized, freedom and oppression for Vietnam” (1). As a result, he suggests that soldiers might perceive the cause as unjust; they struggle to justify their role in the war. As O’Brien depicts, the war is “just the endless march, village to village, without purpose” (5), and they march and fight “but no volition, no will” (5). Certainly, the low morale manifests the soldiers’ uncertainty of the war. For many of them, the war is meaningless, evil, and “a dullness of desire and intellect and conscience and hope and human sensibility” (5). They fight not to win but to survive. The boundary between life and death is almost nonexistent; every step they take on that land is a bet for their life.

The wind blows bitterly, chilling me to the very marrow of my bones. I wrap my arms around my body as I walk slowly between the rows of tombstones. Some are crumbled with age, others made of smooth marble that has yet to face the test of time. Most though, are overgrown and unkempt, those who once tended meticulously to these graves now buried beneath the hard packed soil as well.

Disgusted with the hypocrisy of charging someone with murder amidst a war, Kurtz created his own army where he makes his own decisions in which he can act outside the civilised definition of morality. Kurtz is the conclusion of Willard’s journey, so is Willard to Kurtz’s. Kurtz wishes to die but he must first convey his philosophy to Willard so that he can excoriate the war after he finishes his mission. Kurtz does not hold himself accountable for his actions, believing that morality has no place in war. He has become a dark, godlike figure, emphasised by his

Just while the Vietnamese are fighting for important core values and ways of life, but the Americans are fighting for their ability to go home. Just to see their families. In the movie Apocalypse Now that's what the men are fighting for. But Americans are being forced to use pointless motives of democracy in the name of democracy to fight the war that did not actively matter for the U.S. This is similar to the obscurity of evil in Heart of Darkness where the whole book is like a trip to hell where they encounter groups of people who seem to not care about the problems that they face or run into like when Marlow sees a man trying to carry water in a bucket with a large hole in it. At the Outer Station, he watches native laborers blast away at a hillside with no particular goal in mind.  The area around them is like the hell envisioned in Apocalypse Now with a winding river surrounded by darkening forest and jungle. Both the Congo and Vietnam jungle were described the same, as a hell.

Apocalypse Now starts with U.S. Army captain, Benjamin Willard, waiting in the room of his hotel in Saigon to receive a mission. After his tour in Vietnam, Willard is very psychologically stressed and often has hallucinations of the war, but he continues to have the need to undertake special operations missions. It is then that two special intelligence officers reach out to him. They tell him about his mission, which is to travel along the Nung River into Cambodia to end the command of Special Forces Colonel Walter Kurtz, who has apparently gone insane.

In the twentieth century alone over 108 million people have lost their lives due to war. This does not include only soldiers and those who set out to risk their lives, but civilians and children too. In the movie Apocalypse Now, the film follows the voyage of veteran Benjamin L. Willard and his mission to terminate the noted and recently turned insane Colonel, Walter E. Kurtz. In the backdrop of this mission is the Vietnam War and throughout the movie there is clips of savagery and barbaric actions shown by the the Vietnam and American soldiers and even the Vietnam civilians. When Willard arrives at Kurtz’s outpost, he is introduced to the civilization in Cambodia that Kurtz has become a god too. Kurtz rejects the undefined ‘Rule of War’ that

Leaving Vietnam ala Apocalypse Now, in a helicopter soaring over the water to an aircraft carrier in 1975, is definitely the best way to get out of a war zone, in style. Diem (pronounced Ziim, later changed to Ziem) Nguyen grew up in a Buddhist family, that spoke Vietnamese and basic French. As a child, Ziem lived in a four-story house in Ho Chi Minh City, on the south side of Vietnam. Her dad worked as a pharmacist on the first floor of the building. When she was too young to go to school, she spent her days sitting on a tall stool greeting customers, always with a smile. As Ziem got older, she started “diagnosing” the customers’ illnesses when they walked in the door, suggesting drugs to help them, but the customers thought it was more cute than practical. On the second floor was a lab where her dad made the medications that he would later sell. Her family lived on the third and fourth floors of the building. Outside of Ziem’s house was a city where car

Muscles ached. My arms almost too weak to hold the axe in my hands. The adrenaline made me feel almost sick, like a fire roasting in my stomach, with an almost sweet pain. The now empty cafeteria stank with the ripe smell of undead. Familiar faces one and all. Eyes blank. A smirk crept to a side of my face. I never liked any of them.

Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now is the 1979 epic Vietnam War film based on the novel Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. However the word ‘based’ as to be called into question as the two differ quite dramatically. The periods in which the two stories are about are completely different, within 70 years of each other, as is the setting and the circumstances. However, through the ideas of savagery and madness character, plot, and the themes which both pieces seem to convey the two stories are very similar and it is clear that Coppola was heavily influenced by Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

In Francis Ford Coppola’s critically acclaimed movie “ Apocalypse Now” he portrayed a journey of five soldiers into psychological madness down the harsh Vietnamese jungle river, and through these four specific scenes in cinematic order of the boat’s landings, Francis used this screenplay to boast utter psychological madness of the human mind.

The political and social unrest of the 1970s provided Hollywood with some of its most influential films, often stemming from unlikely sources; two decades after melodrama's heyday, the genre re-emerged in an original form that continues to affect modern filmmaking. The historical influences of Italian opera and Hollywood family melodramas spawned a type of film that has been described as "historical, operatic, choral or epic" (Greene 388). Filmmakers of the 1970s explored the traditional modes of melodramatic expression in order to address the socially charged times they lived in. Filmed in the wake of the Vietnam War, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now is a complex treatise of human morality