APOCALYPSE NOW AS AN HISTORICAL DOCUMENT

Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now was released in 1979 and was based ostensibly on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Written in two different centuries, and with a different point of viewùConrad was writing about the consequences of globalization in commerce while Coppola used the Vietnam War as a backdropùboth the book and the film can also be viewed as the personal journey taken by the central character, Willard. In a larger sense, however, Apocalypse Now represents a departure of the way that Americans considered war films. World War II films were traditionally jingoistic with little or no criticism of war itself. Even a previous Vietnam War film, The Green Berets, was largely a pro-American, pro-war piece. This analysis considers the film as an historical document, and how it both reflects its time and foreshadows changes in American society.

The plot of Apocalypse Now is straightforward: Captain Willard is given orders to travel upriver to where a renegade colonel has set up his own fiefdom. If Willard cannot persuade Colonel Kurtz to give up his activities, he is to "terminate with extreme prejudice"ùa euphemism that Willard understands means to execute Kurtz.

Although the plot is itself straightforward, it takes twists and turns just as the boat does as the film and the boat crew proceeds upriver. The boat crew encounters a USO show, but unlike the Bob Hope Christmas specials that were r

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s reinforces the idea that this is not a traditional war film. The boat crew is slowly killed off as the boat moves upriver, and when Willard finally arrives at Kurtz's compound, he is met by Dennis Hopper who plays a strung-out photographer who is caught up in Kurtz's spell and who serves to try to explain Kurtz to Willard. There are intellectual conversations between Kurtz, who knows that Willard has been sent to kill him, and Willard, and scenes of extreme violence as Hopper's character is killed and savagely displayed. What sets these scenes apart from other war movies is not only their violence, but the fact that this is American-on-American violence. Granted, Kurtz is portrayed as a military man who has clearly strayed from the military path, but audiences were not used to seeing even renegade officers portrayed in this way. There is also the ambiguity of which characterùKurtz or Willardùhas the moral high ground given that Willard's purpose is to execute Kurtz without benefit of judicial due process. Apocalypse Now was made after the last helicopters left Saigon and after the nation had time to reflect on what the war and the protests against it had meant. The Vietnam War was different than any war before or since in
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1259
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)