Imperialism In Apocalypse Now

The 1987 film Apocalypse Now, written by John Milius and written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, took direct inspiration from Joseph Conrad’s 1899 impressionistic novel, Heart of Darkness. Coppola illuminates numerous parallels between Captain Willard and Conrad’s Charles Marlow in their respective journeys upriver to meet with Kurtz, especially when Willard’s and Marlow’s crews are attacked by natives. The dissipative death of the helmsman in search of Kurtz reflects the corruption and futility of imperialism as both Captain Willard and Charles Marlow witness the distorted views of imperialism’s ramifications. Through the use of cinematic tools, Coppola is able to capture the same level of depth to his implicit meanings as seen in Heart
Just as Marlow and his crew become restless, scouring “the river, the shore, the woods,” (Conrad 86) and the water for anything extraordinary, Willard and his crew are thrown into paranoia as they traverse through the foggy waters. As Conrad uses this polysyndeton to create his eerie and tense mood, Coppola emphasizes their paranoia and creates an ominous mood by showing dead bodies scattered upon the shore in an wide shot to show the strings of corpses remaining from Col. Kurtz’s slaughter. In conjunction, the ambient sounds of the jungle emphasizes this ambiance to increase tension as the viewer anticipates the attack. During the attack, Willard and Marlow both witness the fall into “darkness” of the helmsman as they succumb to the influence of the jungle and its people. Marlow watches as the helmsman runs amok, shooting at the “savages” in a crazed fashion. Though Coppola is unable to describe the change that takes place in the helmsman, he captures it through the use of various medium shots, as well as high key lighting transitioning into low key lighting. As the spear impales the helmsman, the action ceases and the helmsman falls from the natural light of the sun into the shadows of the
Coppola parallels the death of the helmsman scene in its major details and utilizes the sound and lighting to emphasize the implicit tones of the story. The fall into darkness and the transformation of the characters, such as the helmsmen, as they travel further up river and the futility of the imperialistic response of the Americans in Vietnam to communism, mirroring the use of Heart of Darkness, presents an illustration of the futility of imperialistic operations of the Europeans in Africa. As Col. Kurtz reads “Hollow Men” by T. S. Eliot, the characters are shown to be “hollow,” as they are no longer the Willard or Marlow that they were at the beginning of their odysseys, rather a “hollow” shell of the men they were, their characters twisted and distorted by the brutality and horrors of what they had witnessed. War and imperialism often leads to the disfiguration of the human character at “The horror,” (Conrad 115) tearing away at man’s sanity, “[T]he heart of a conquering darkness” (Conrad 120) is left transformed into a “hollowed” shell of its former self through the futility of man in its efforts to benefit mankind which are