Francis Ford Coppola's take on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness via the Vietnam War in the film Apocalypse Now was nominated for eight Academy Awards. The film only won two well-deserved Oscars, for Best Cinematography and Best Sound. Sound and cinematography are expertly used in the film to help convey its themes, which Coppola also achieves through the use of symbolism. This analysis will discuss the elements of sound and cinematography in the film as they relate to its themes, including an analysis of two key sequences in the film that hold symbolic meaning.
In Apocalypse Now, Roger Ebert (1) maintains that Coppola has fashioned an "insanely inspired gesture" of filmmaking "of moments that are operatic in their style and scope." Using a musical term to comment on the intensity of the film is well chosen, since the film's music often drives its action forward as well as reinforcing several of the film's themes. The main theme of the film is the horror, madness and folly that are war. One of the most dramatic sequences in the film that symbolizes this is greatly enhanced by music. When gung-ho Colonel Kilgore, who "loves the smell of napalm in the morning," orchestrates an attack on a seemingly peaceful Vietnamese village, he instructs certain music to be played to make the attack seem more ferocious to the Vietnamese (Coppola 1979). As Kilgore explains, "We'll come in low out of the rising sun, and about a mile out, we'll put on the music...Yeah, use Wagner. Scares the hell out of the slopes. My boys love it" (Coppola 1979). When the bombastic strains of Wagner start piping out of helicopters as the attack begins, it is one of the most intense moments and scenes in the film that shows the horrors of war.
The opening of the film also uses cinematography and sound to convey the film's theme that war is hell and often there is little distinction between the bru
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