Perspectives in Apocalypse Now and The Sorrow of War: One.
These appraisals shy away from one seemingly important question in particular: what is the movie about?On one level, the answer to that question comes easily: a modern adaptation of Joseph Conrad's 1899 novel Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now transplants and transforms Conrad's story of a journey up the Congo River to the stronghold of an ivory trader into the context of 1969 Vietnam.
Apocalypse Now is a version of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, although there are no credits of any kind on the print being shown in New York and the program notes simply say the film was “written by John Milius and Francis Coppola.” Actually the movie is full of remarkably inventive translations of pieces of Conrad’s complicated tale, down.
A movie entitled “Apocalypse Now”, directed by Francis Ford Coppola was announced as “criticism of everything that exists” within the meaninglessness and decadence-led war in Vietnam.
A s much a magnum opus as it is a film maudit, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now may be the most debated film of the New Hollywood era. Lauded and condemned for its psychedelic vision of the Vietnam War, the film needs little in the way of introduction. Its transposition of Joseph Conrad’s 1902 novella Heart of Darkness is equal parts lucid and incoherent, boasting some of the most.
Apocalypse Now is the definitive war-as-hell statement, a frenzied, free-based ode to the anguished soldier and the need-to-numb that crests over him in the face and wake of war. With no offense to Terrence Malick’s existential The Thin Red Line and its singular concern for the plight of the everyman, no war film has matched Coppola’s madly overcooked polemic.
Apocalypse Now opens in Saigon in 1968. Army captain and special intelligence agent Benjamin Willard is holed up in a hotel room, heavily intoxicated and desperate to get back into action. He has completed one tour of duty in Vietnam, only to go home a changed man, miserable amid the confines of civilization.
Apocalypse Now is a classic anti-war movie, like All Quiet on the Western Front or The Grand Illusion. It suggests that much of war isn't really about high ideals or righteous causes. In the case of the Vietnam War, Apocalypse Now doesn't make the war look like it was about defeating communism. It depicts it as senseless slaughter without.