The film Apocalypse Now (1979) is a translation of Joseph Conrad's short novel Heart of Darkness to the milieu of the Vietnam War. In doing so, screenwriters John Milius and Francis Coppola utilize the basic plot structure of the novel, with elements altered to reflect the horrors and terrors of the war. Underlying both the novel and the film is the idea of the journey into the darkest areas of the human soul. The film indeed carries this much further than does the novel because where Conrad features a central character who comes to question his own righteousness and to wonder whether all men could not become a Kurtz under the right circumstances, Milius and Coppola see the war in Vietnam as made up of precisely the "right" circumstances. The war is a veritable cauldron of evil forces in which the central character not only fears he might be just like Kurtz, but in the end is precisely like Kurtz. Director Coppola finds a visual style that makes concrete the sese of evil, darkness, and human disintegration that Conrad manages to create through his prose style. The film also takes a more direct route in one sense, since the framing story of the film is different from that of the novel, a difference that is important in considering the different intentions of the filmmakers as opposed to the novelist.
In Heart of Darkness, the character of Marlow, a persona for the author used in several stories and novels, makes a journey from civilization into the darkest part of Africa to bring back a man named Kurtz who has gone into the interior and shed his civilized exterior to degenerate into the primitive. For Conrad, the individual possesses within himself the possibility of the primitive, but society and civilization have created a framework of control by which the individual can escape from that state. This seems evident in the opening passages as Marlow is about to tell his story to the other men sitting on the deck and refers to...