...Joseph Tanaka Dr. Whipple Eng 150 Apocalypse Now Review The sound of machine guns, the whirl of helicopter blades, and “the smell of napalm in the morning” makes Apocalypse Now by Francis Ford Coppola look like a traditional, action-packed Vietnam War movie. However, upon further examination, the film reveals a much deeper, ominous, and senseless reality that realistically depicts the Vietnam War. Apocalypse Now is a masterpiece of the nineteen sixty counter culture movement that is transposed into the characters of the Vietnam War. The aspects of Apocalypse Now that make it one of the most horrifying movies of the Vietnam era are the characters, the plot, and the setting. The horrifying way human beings treat one another is an enduring quality present in the characters Apocalypse Now. Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore’s Ninth Air Calvary embodies the brutality of the war because of his callous attack on a village filled with non combative residents. In the scene of the helicopter attack on the Mekong Delta village, a Vietnamese villager comes up to an American helicopter loading a wounded soldier and throws a hat with a grenade inside, blowing up everyone inside. Upon seeing this attack by a single villager, Kilgore exclaims, “Holy Christ she’s a savage, somebody get that Dink!” and a group of helicopters decimate her family trying to run away. Not only ruthless was Kilgore’s response but also the amusement that his own soldiers felt while shooting the woman and other innocent civilians...
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...Apocalypse Now-Heart of Darkness Apocalypse Now was set in Vietnam 1968. At this time the Vietnam War was controversial. The American antiwar movement was gaining power. John Milius wrote the original screenplay based on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness but updated it to take place during the Vietnam War. During both times there was a great undertaking of territory. The Congo was being acquired by European presence in Heart of Darkness. As Conrad’s experience took him into the Congo; he observed firsthand knowledge of the atrocities of European imperialism. He witnessed the enslavement of a society and the rich wealth of the ivory trade. In Apocalypse Now it was the American presence for South Vietnams independence that was at stake. America became involved in the conflict between North and South Vietnam because its policy makers feared the spread of communism. American young men were sent by the thousands every month to Vietnam. Thousands of innocent people lost their lives. The main theme of both Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now are based on a man that is known as a great military leader, and has a dossier full of accomplishments. Kurtz, which has been overtaken with darkness. His mind is not that of someone who is thinking straight. Kurtz in Heart of Darkness turns out to be emaciated and weak when Marlow first gets to see him and Kurtz in Apocalypse Now a strong figure with a sinister presence when encountered by Willard. In Apocalypse Now Kurtz is in Cambodia with...
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...Portrayal of Vietnam War has become a popular theme in modern media due to the vast extent of people who are exposed to it. The effects of war on both the body and mind are clearly portrayed in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. The audience is shown the negative outcomes of war; the chaos it brings to communities along with the mental decay of all involved. These are not your classic “Saving Private Ryan” films, where American troops come in and clean house. Rather these films portray the psychotic side of war, where some soldiers come back to society and can no longer function normally. Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now portray war as an ugly, disturbing event which affects both the soldiers and the people back home. Taxi Driver is set around the life of Vietnam Veteran, Travis Bickle. As...
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...The effects of war on both the body and mind are clearly portrayed in both Taxi Driver and Apocalypse Now. We also see war in film with a negative twist, we see the chaos, the mental decay both during and after the war is finished. These are not your classic Saving Private Ryan films, where the Americans come in and clean house. These films show the psychotic side of war, how some people come back to society and cannot function like the rest of society. These films portray war as an ugly disturbing event, which affects both the soldiers and the people back home. In Taxi Driver, we learn about Vietnam Veteran Travis Bickle. As the film unravels we see how Vietnam affects both soldiers and Americans. We come to see a split society, young against...
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...regardless of its consequence. There is always an evil side living inside the human soul, and this evil side breaks out during times when there is a difference in culture; for example, during World War II, Nazis killed any Jews that appeared in Europe, and their reason was Jews were not considered Germans, and they were believed to be disloyal and untrustworthy. This shows the difference in culture that created darkness inside the mind of the Nazis, who told them to do unimaginable things. The madness, fear, imperialism, death, escape, and difference in culture are the main theme of Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now; although they were written in different times, settings, and purposes, they both express how savage the human mind can be when he confronts with darkness. Both the novel Heart of Darkness and the film Apocalypse Now address the idea of imperialism. Imperialism, defining as a country’s political, military, and economic domination over another, is the theme that talk thoroughly in both works. For instance, in Heart of Darkness, richer nations are robbing the goods in Africa, such as ivory and slaves, while in Apocalypse Now America is trying to subvert Vietnam from being Communism. A modern example that relate to the idea of imperialism is America showing assistant to the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and its reason is to secure the oil trade with Iraq. Clearly, America is using its superior power to dominate other countries from being threaten, and this is the danger...
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...A Further Analysis of Apocalypse Now Vlad Dovgan History Through Film Mr. Ellis Graham 1/13/2013 It is said that some of the best things in life are those that come unexpected. For weeks, my friend had nagged me to watch a movie he had seen, called Apocalypse Now. He described it to me, and I was not interested. War movies don’t excite me that much, and I did not want to go out of the way to watch it. I’m not a violent person so watching this movie would be out of characteristic for me. However, when this research paper was assigned, it seemed to be destiny that I would finally watch this movie. I gave in, and decided this would be a great way to kill two birds with one stone- I would satisfy my friend, and be able to complete this assignment. Little did I know at the time, I was in for something truly special. While most men would be satisfied serving their team in war and returning home, the same could not be said for Benjamin Willard. After fighting in Vietnam, Willard found that he did not fit in back in America. He was miserable and desired to return to battle, so he did. A highly regarded man, Willard was given the task of finding and killing Walter E. Kurtz, a murderer who is stationed in Cambodia with the Montagnards, who view him as a god. To reach Kurtz, Willard joins the crew of a Navy river patrol boat who are to ferry him up a fictional river up to Cambodia. The boat’s crew consists of four men: Chief, Chef, Lance, and Clean. With help from...
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...Under the influence of war, soldiers become intoxicated by the chaotic environment and seize the opportunity to commit immoral acts. However, several factors including politics, the participants, and the concept of war itself, allow for this dangerous environment to exist; this is especially true of the long and brutal war the United States was involved with in Vietnam. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, photographs from the war, and the film Apocalypse Now convey the nonexistent boundaries of war in regards to morality. These sources represent how the bureaucratic side of the conflict took precedent over the lives of soldiers and how an environment indifferent to morality lead to the desensitized mentality and loss of humanity experienced by the...
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...Student’s Name Professor’s Name Course Date An analysis of the film Apocalypse Now The Apocalypse Now is an outwardly delightful, weighty perfect work of art with surrealistic and typical arrangements itemizing the disarray, roughness, dread, and nightmarish franticness of the Vietnam War. On first look, Apocalypse Now may resemble a war film or maybe even a dramatization. It felt like a thriller, loathsomeness, an epic and also a film that was past the typical limitations classification to me. O'Donnell (p 19) points out that lighting is as a key segment in the film close by fogs and shadows. The general appearance of the film is dull and shadowy concerning the subject of war and the faint experience that the officers grasp in that. As the enterprise begins, the lights are steadily raised. Willard starts his vessel ride in nightfall. However, as the excursion gets more profound, the movie gets gloomy, the shadows get maintained, and light is darkened. The movie’s lighting is profoundly illustrative of the risks of the conflict in the wilderness and the allegorical voyage that the warriors attempt in the otherworldly domain. The vessel, relevantly named "Erebus" (the dim locale of the netherworld, the one that the dead must go before they achieve Hell; the underworld), is not lit by any stretch of the imagination, yet is the only asylum in the profound wilderness around. The lights are flashy and difficult to the eyes (Hell’s fire) whereas the blacks are demanding to the...
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...APOCALYPSE NOW ←Page-to-Screen Adaptation→ John Milius’s original screenplay moved Joseph Conrad’s 1898 novella Heart of Darkness from colonial Africa to the heart of the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. Although Milius made drastic changes, he left the basic structure intact: a man travels upriver to face an evil genius and, along the way, must face his fears, his mortality, and the possibility that he will go slowly insane. Director Francis Ford Coppola in turn embellished Milius’s screenplay to make it more closely mirror Conrad’s book, cutting scenes, adding others, and demanding a great deal of improvisation from his actors. Milius and Coppola therefore shared the film’s screenwriting credit. Author Michael Herr, who wrote a notable collection of Vietnam War articles entitled Dispatches, also received a writing credit for penning the film’s narration. In addition to switching the setting, Milius renamed or modified nearly all of Conrad’s characters (aside from Kurtz). Conrad’s protagonist, Marlow, a pensive sailor on a quest to meet the ostensibly great, multitalented thinker Kurtz, becomes Milius’s Army Captain Benjamin Willard, an emotionally scarred Special Forces operative on a classified mission to terminate Kurtz. Milius’s Kurtz was an outstanding military officer who has apparently gone crazy. As the film opens, he leads a small colony in Cambodia, relying on “unsound methods” for imperious control. Moreover, Kurtz as portrayed by actor Marlon Brando is drastically...
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...into a specific genre, and to present familiar material in an unconventional way. Unpleasant images are a form of artistic symbolism that creates a story without any words. The audience can digest the meaning and emotion behind what is on screen without having to be told. For example, American History X displays racism through the use of symbols and colors when Derek, one of the main characters, steps out on his front porch half-naked showing his bare white skin covered in dark tattoos of swastikas and white-power mottos (Smith 249). The racism displayed on his body will likely remain in the audience’s head even after they have left the theatre. The film Apocalypse Now follows the journey of a man through the Vietnam War, while illuminating the horrors, violence, and affects it had on Americans. The vision of the Vietnam jungle, fire, and helicopters in the opening scene, accompanied by Jim Morrison’s...
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...and stylistic convention) but revamps particular details in those particular ways that the filmmakers see as necessary and fitting. The third one is radical, which reshapes the book in extreme and revolutionary ways both as a means of interpreting the literature and of making the film a more fully independent work. (Linda Cahir, p17) Traditional adaptation and radical adaptation are considered to be the top two types of film adaptations to discuss since traditional adaptation and radical adaptation are mostly seen in films. In order to examine the effectiveness of both traditional adaptation and radical adaptation in films, Pride and Prejudice (both novel and film), Heart of Darkness (novella) and the film adaptation of this novella Apocalypse Now are going to be discussed here. According to Linda Cahir, “Traditional adaptation maintains the overall traits of the book (its plots, settings, and stylistic convention) but revamps particular details in those particular ways that the filmmakers see as necessary and fitting. (P16)” Pride and Prejudice (both film and novel) is applied here to examine the nature of the traditional adaptation and evaluate the effectiveness of traditional adaptation in the film. As far...
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...Zombies have taken over the world, but not in the way we expected. Instead of rising from their graves and devouring our brains they have instead taken over every and all forms of pop culture. Whether it be movies, books, television, video games, or music, its all about Zombies. Every year they seem to become more and more prevalent in our daily lives. Unlike other crazes such as Aliens or Vampires, Zombies and Zombie Apocalypse scenarios have captivated millions of individuals for over 50 years. Zombies originated in Haitian Folklore around the 19th century, however it was not until the late 1960s that the Zombie Craze took off. Now forty-seven years after the Zombie Craze began people are still fascinated with the dead rising and taking...
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...Michael Herr. In this book, Michael Herr describes the Vietnam conflict from the point of view of the people of the ground and the view from the journalists covering the conflict. During the Vietnam...
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...Shirley Reigada Professor Frongillio HUM2250 October 5, 2014 The film substitutes Vietnam for Africa in setting but leaves, with the exception of some characters, the novel’s basic structure intact. Do you agree that the movie retains the key elements and core meanings of the novel? Is the movie a literal, loose, or intermediate adaptation? What are the major changes and are they significant? Is the movie more political or mythical, prosaic or poetic, realistic or formalist, in your point of view? In the film Apocalypse Now by F.F Coppola, and the adaption of Heart of the Darkness was updated to fit in the movie with the environment and the time frame. Also being true to many of the events, characters, themes and the ideas presented in the story. I wondered what ideas would have changed and what indicated the director, and even the society as one, felt about the concepts that were no longer satisfactory....
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...takes place after the Vietnam War. A reoccurring theme throughout the story is how several of the soldiers in the platoon handle the mental challenges accompanied by war. During the chapter “Field Trip,” the character O’Brien returns with his daughter Kathleen to visit Vietnam including where Kiowa died. Kathleen is a crucial character as she represents the purity of Americans during the time of the Vietnam War- not the purity of younger generations. “Field Trip” contains ideas of coping with the war’s events, and presents the state of mind soldiers were in while introducing Kathleen who symbolizes the innocence of Vietnam-era American citizens. O’Brien takes Kathleen to see where Kiowa died, which is not only significant...
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