Apocalypse Now
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Apocalypse Now
theatrical release poster by Bob Peak
Directed by
Francis Ford Coppola
Produced by
Francis Ford Coppola
John Milius
Screenplay by
Francis Ford Coppola
Michael Herr (narration)
Story by
Joseph Conrad (novel)
Narrated by
Joe Estevez (uncredited)
Martin Sheen
Marlon Brando
Starring
Robert Duvall
Laurence Fishburne
Dennis Hopper
Harrison Ford
Frederic Forrest
Sam Bottoms
Albert Hall
Music by
Cinematography
Carmine Coppola
Francis Ford Coppola
Vittorio Storaro
Apocalypse Now is a 1979 American epic war film set during the Vietnam War. The plot revolves
around two US Army special operations officers, one of whom, Captain Benjamin L. Willard
(Martin Sheen) of MACV-SOG, is sent into the jungle to assassinate the other, the rogue and
presumably insane Colonel Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando) of Special Forces.
The film was produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola from a script by Coppola and John
Milius. The script is based on Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness, and also draws elements
from Michael Herr's Dispatches, the film version of Conrad's Lord Jim (which shares the same
character of Marlow with Heart of Darkness), and Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God
(1972).[1]
The film became notorious in the entertainment press due to its lengthy and troubled production, as
documented in Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse. Marlon Brando showed up to the
set overweight and Martin Sheen suffered a heart attack. The production was also beset by extreme
weather that destroyed several expensive sets. In addition, the release date of the film was delayed
several times as Coppola struggled to come up with an ending and to edit the millions of feet of
footage that he had shot.
Plot
The film opens, introducing Captain Benjamin L. Willard (Martin Sheen); a deeply troubled,
seasoned special operations veteran. It is 1969. Willard has returned to Saigon from deployment in
the field. He drinks excessively and appears to be having difficulty adjusting to life in the rear-area.
Two intelligence officers, Lt. General Corman (G. D. Spradlin) and Colonel Lucas (Harrison Ford),
and a government man (Jerry Ziesmer) approach him with an assignment: journey up the fictitious
Nung River into the remote Cambodian jungle to find Colonel Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a
member of the US Army Special Forces feared to have gone rogue.
They tell Willard that Kurtz, once considered a model officer and future general, has gone insane
and is commanding a legion of his own Montagnard troops deep inside the forest in neutral
Cambodia. Their claims are supported by very disturbing radio broadcasts and recordings made by
Kurtz himself. Willard is ordered to undertake a mission to find Kurtz and terminate the Colonel's
command "with extreme prejudice".
Willard joins the crew of a Navy Patrol Boat, Riverine (PBR) named the "Erebus" -- radio call sign
"PBR Street Gang" -- with an eclectic crew composed of: boat commander QMC George "Chief"
Phillips (Albert Hall), GM3 Lance B. Johnson (Sam Bottoms), GM3 Tyrone Miller (Laurence
Fishburne) a.k.a. "Mr. Clean", and EN3 Jay "Chef" Hicks (Frederic Forrest).
Willard and the PBR crew rendezvous with the First of the Ninth Air Cavalry, commanded by
Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall) for escort to the Nung River. He initially scoffs at
their request for escort until Kilgore, a keen surfer, is told by one of his men that Lance Johnson, a
professional surfer, is a member of the boat's crew. Kilgore befriends Johnson, and later at a beach
barbeque Willard explains that there are only a few points where they can enter the Nung River.
Willard identifies an opening on the map, but Kilgore advises that the point is held by the Viet
Cong and that he has lost several reconnaissance helicopters there. When one of his men advises
that the beach at Vinh Dinh Drop is perfect for surfing, having a six-foot peak and a bowl section
that's "tube city". Kilgore changes his mind about escorting Willard and the PBR to the river and
decides to capture the village. His men advise him that it's "Charlie's point" and heavily fortified.
Dismissing this concern with the explanation that "Charlie don't surf!", Kilgore orders his men to
saddle up in the morning to capture the town and the beach.
Riding high above the coast in a fleet of Hueys accompanied by OH-6As, Kilgore launches his
attack on the beach. The scene, famous for its use of Richard Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries",
ends with the soldiers surfing the barely-secured beach amidst mortar explosions. After helicopters
swoop over the village and demolish all visible signs of resistance, a giant napalm strike in the
nearby jungle dramatically marks the climax of the battle. Kilgore exults to Willard, "I love the
smell of napalm in the morning... The smell, you know that gasoline smell... Smells like, victory",
as he recalls a battle in which a hill was bombarded with napalm for over twelve hours.
The lighting and mood darken as the boat navigates upstream and Willard's silent obsession with
Kurtz deepens. Incidents on the journey include a run-in with a tiger while Willard and Chef search
for mangoes. The boat continues up river and the crew watches a USO show featuring Playboy
Bunnies and a centerfold that degenerates into chaos.
Shortly after the Playmate performance, Chief spots a sampan and orders an inspection over the
objections of Willard. Initially reluctant to board the boat, Chef impatiently searches it; a young
woman on the boat makes a sudden movement towards a barrel, prompting Clean to open fire with
his M60 and kill nearly everyone on the sampan. As the woman lies dying, Chef discovers that the
barrel contains the woman's pet puppy. Chief insists on taking the woman to receive medical
attention; however, Willard ends the debate by shooting her, calmly stating, "I told you not to stop",
further alienating himself from the PBR's crew.
The boat moves up river to the American outpost at the Do Long bridge, the last U.S. Army outpost
on the river, passing wreckage of a downed Huey helicopter. The boat arrives during a North
Vietnamese attack on the bridge, which is under constant construction. Upon arrival, Willard
receives the last piece of the dossier from a lieutenant named Carlson, along with mail for the boat
crewmen. Willard goes ashore with Lance, who has taken LSD, and they make their way through
the trenches where they encounter many panicked, leaderless soldiers. Realizing the situation has
devolved into chaos, Willard and Lance return to the boat. Chief tries to convince Willard not to
continue on with his mission. In response, Willard snaps at Chief to continue upriver.
The next day, Willard learns from the information he received at Do Lung that an Army Captain
named Colby (Scott Glenn) was sent to find Kurtz a few months prior to Willard's assignment and
is now missing. While the crew is busy reading mail, Lance pops open a purple smoke grenade,
catching the attention of an unseen enemy hiding in the trees by the river, and prompting an attack
on the boat. Clean is killed as he listens to an audio tape from his mother. Chief, who had a close
relationship with Clean, becomes increasingly hostile to Willard. As the boat continues up the river
it passes under the tail of a crashed B-52D Stratofortress.
Later, Montagnard villagers begin shooting arrows at the boat as it approaches the camp. The crew
opens fire until Chief is hit by a spear. Willard attempts to assist the mortally wounded Chief, who
tries to kill Willard by pulling him onto the spear tip protruding from his chest. Willard grapples
with Chief until the man finally dies. Afterwards, Willard confides in Chef and Lance about his
mission, and the two surviving crew of the boat reluctantly agree to continue their journey upriver
as they are now in Cambodia. As they draw closer, they see the coastline is littered with dead
bodies.
After arriving at Kurtz' outpost, Willard leaves Chef behind with orders to call in an airstrike on the
village if he does not return and takes Johnson with him to the village. They are met by a manic
freelance photographer (Dennis Hopper), who explains that Kurtz's greatness and philosophical
skills inspire his people to follow him. As they go into the village, there are bodies that are ignored
by the villagers, as well as severed heads scattered about the nearby Buddhist temple which serves
as Kurtz's living quarters. Willard also encounters the missing Captain Colby, who is in a nearly
catatonic state.
Willard is brought before Kurtz in the darkened temple, where Kurtz derides him as "an errand boy,
sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill". The scene changes to Chef attempting to call in the airstrike
on the village as ordered by Willard. The scene cuts to Willard bound to a post outside in the
pouring rain. Kurtz walks up to him and drops Chef's severed head into his lap.
After some time in captivity, Willard is released and given the freedom of the compound. Kurtz
lectures him on his theories of war, humanity, and civilization, knowing that Willard would not
leave. Kurtz explains his motives and philosophy in a haunting monologue in which he praises the
ruthlessness of the Viet Cong which he witnessed firsthand after one of his own humanitarian
missions. He recalls the incident as leaving him traumatized but also giving him a new and deeper
understanding of the complexities of his enemy and the level to which the US would have to
commit in order to prevail. Kurtz also asks Willard to tell his son everything about him in the event
of his death. That night, as the villagers conduct a ceremonial slaughter of a water buffalo, Willard
enters Kurtz's chamber as Kurtz is making a recording, and attacks him with a machete.
Lying bloody and dying on the ground, Kurtz whispers "The horror... the horror..." before dying.
Willard descends the stairs from Kurtz' chamber and drops his weapon. The villagers do so as well.
Willard walks through the now-silent crowd of natives and takes the last surviving crewperson, the
near-catatonic Lance, by the hand. With his mission accomplished, Willard leads Lance to the PBR,
and the two of them sail away as Kurtz's final words echo and the scene fades to black.
In some, but not all, prints of the film, the closing credits play over footage of Kurtz' temple-base
exploding; some viewers interpreted this as an air strike called in by Willard. Because this was not
Coppola's intention, after the film's original general release he replaced this footage with a plain
black screen.
Use of T.S. Eliot's poetry
In the film, shortly before his death, Colonel Kurtz recites most of T.S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow
Men." Not only is Kurtz in the novel characterized as "hollow at the core", the poem is preceded in
printed editions by the epigraph "Mistah Kurtz - he dead", a quotation from Conrad's Heart of
Darkness which was the inspiration for the film.
In addition, two books seen opened on Kurtz' desk in the film are From Ritual to Romance by Jessie
Weston and The Golden Bough by Sir James Frazer, the two books that Eliot cited as the chief
sources and inspiration for his poem "The Waste Land."
When Willard is first introduced to Dennis Hopper's character, the photojournalist describes his
own worth in relation to that of Kurtz with "I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling
across the floors of silent seas", from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."
Heart of Darkness is a novella written by Joseph Conrad. Before its 1902 publication, it appeared
as a three-part series (1899) in Blackwood's Magazine. It is widely regarded as a significant work of
English literature[1] and part of the Western canon.
The story tells of Charles Marlow, an Englishman who took a foreign assignment from a Belgian
trading company as a ferry-boat captain in Africa. Heart of Darkness exposes the dark side of
European colonization while exploring the three levels of darkness that the protagonist, Marlow,
encounters: the darkness of the Congo wilderness, the darkness of the Europeans' cruel treatment of
the natives, and the unfathomable darkness within every human being for committing heinous acts
of evil.[2] Although Conrad does not give the name of the river, at the time of writing the Congo
Free State, the location of the large and important Congo River, was a private colony of Belgium's
King Leopold II. In the story, Marlow is employed to transport ivory downriver. However, his more
pressing assignment is to return Kurtz, another ivory trader, to civilization, in a cover-up. Kurtz has
a reputation throughout the region.
This symbolic story is a story within a story or frame narrative. It follows Marlow as he recounts
from dusk through to late night, to a group of men aboard a ship anchored in the Thames Estuary
his Congolese adventure. The passage of time and the darkening sky during the fictitious narrativewithin-the-narrative parallel the atmosphere of the story.
Background
Eight and a half years before writing the book, Conrad had gone to serve as the captain of a Congo
steamer. On arriving in the Congo, he found his steamer damaged and under repair. He became sick
and returned to Europe before serving as captain. Some of Conrad's experiences in the Congo and
the story's historic background, including possible models for Kurtz, are recounted in Adam
Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost.[3]
The story-within-a-story literary device that Conrad chose for Heart of Darkness—one in which
Charles Marlow relates to other characters his account of his journey—has many literary
precedents. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein used a similar
device but the best known examples are Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, The Arabian
Nights, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Boccaccio's Decameron.
Plot summary
The story opens with an unnamed narrator describing five men, apparently colleagues, on a boat
anchored on the River Thames near London and the surroundings as dusk settles in and they await
the turning of the tide. The narrator cites a passenger known as Marlow: the only one of the men
who "still followed the sea." Marlow makes a comment about London having been, too, "one of the
dark places on earth"; thus begins the story of Marlow and a job he took as captain of a steamship in
Africa.
The Roi des Belges, the Belgian riverboat Conrad commanded on the upper Congo, 1889
He begins by ruminating on how Britain's image among Ancient Roman officials must have been
similar to Africa's image among 19th century British officials. He describes how his "dear aunt"
used many of her contacts to secure the job for him. When he arrives at the job, he encounters many
men he dislikes as they strike him as untrustworthy. They speak often of a man named Kurtz, who
has quite a reputation in many areas of expertise. He is somewhat of a rogue ivory collector,
"essentially a great musician," a journalist, a skilled painter and "a universal genius".
Marlow arrives at the Central Station run by the general manager, an unwholesome conspiratorial
character. He finds that his steamship has been sunk and spends several months waiting for parts to
repair it. There is a rumor regarding Kurtz being ill; this makes the delays in repairing the ship all
the more costly. Marlow gets the parts and he and the manager set out with a few agents and a crew
of cannibals on a long, difficult voyage up the river.
Old Belgian river station on the Congo River, 1889
Marlow and the crew discover a hut with stacked firewood together with a note saying that the
wood is for them but that they should approach cautiously. Shortly after the steamer has taken on
the firewood it is surrounded by a dense fog. When the fog clears, the ship is attacked by an unseen
band of natives, who shoot arrows from the safety of the forest, killing one of the crew. When they
later reach Kurtz's station, they are met by a Russian trader who assures them that everything is fine
and informs them that he is the one who left the wood and the note. They find that Kurtz has made
himself into providence with the natives and has led brutal raids in the surrounding territory in
search of ivory.
Marlow and his crew take the ailing Kurtz aboard their ship and depart. Kurtz is lodged in Marlow's
pilothouse and Marlow begins to see that Kurtz is every bit as grandiose as previously described.
However, Marlow finds himself disappointed with Kurtz's childish schemes for fame and fortune.
During this time, Kurtz gives Marlow a collection of papers and a photograph for safekeeping; both
had witnessed the manager going through Kurtz's belongings. The photograph is of a beautiful
woman whom Marlow assumes is Kurtz's love interest, or, as Marlow calls her, "his intended."
One night Marlow happens upon Kurtz, obviously near death. As Marlow comes closer with a
candle, Kurtz seems to experience a moment of clarity and speaks his last words: "The horror! The
horror!" Marlow believes this to be Kurtz's reflection on the events of his life. Marlow does not
inform the manager or any of the other voyagers of Kurtz's death; the news is instead broken by the
manager's child-servant.
Marlow later returns to his home city and is confronted by many people seeking things and ideas of
Kurtz. Marlow meets Kurtz's fiancée about a year later; she is still in mourning. When she asks him
about Kurtz's death, Marlow tells her that his last words were her name, and not "the horror! the
horror!"
The story concludes back on the boat on the Thames, with a description of how the river seemed to
lead into the heart of an immense darkness.
Motifs
He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more
than a breath—"The horror! The horror!"
– Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
T. S. Eliot's use of a quotation from The Heart of Darkness—"Mistah Kurtz, he dead"—as an
epigraph to the original manuscript of his poem The Hollow Men contrasted its dark horror with the
presumed "light of civilization," and suggested the ambiguity of both the dark motives of
civilization and the freedom of barbarism, as well as the "spiritual darkness" of several characters in
Heart of Darkness. This sense of darkness also lends itself to a related theme of obscurity—again,
in various senses, reflecting the ambiguities in the work. Morality is ambiguous, that which is
traditionally placed on the side of "light" is in darkness and vice versa.
Population réunie dans la forêt au passage du vapeur Roi des Belges - Sankuru (1888)
Africa was known as "The Dark Continent" in the Victorian Era with all the negative connotations
attributed to Africans by many of the British. One of the possible influences for the Kurtz character
was Henry Morton Stanley of "Dr. Livingstone, I presume" fame, as he was a principal explorer of
"The Dark Heart of Africa", particularly the Congo. Stanley was supposedly infamous for his
violence against his porters while in Africa, although records indicate this was perhaps an
exaggeration[4] and he was later honoured with a knighthood. An agent Conrad met when travelling
in the Congo, Georges-Antoine Klein, could also have served as a model for Kurtz (in German klein
means "small" and kurz means "short"). Klein died aboard Conrad's steamer and was interred along
the Congo, much like Kurtz in the novel.[5] Among the people Conrad may have encountered on his
journey was a trader called Leon Rom, who was later named chief of the Stanley Falls Station. In
1895, a British traveller reported that Rom had decorated his flower-bed with the skulls of some
twenty-one victims of his displeasure (including women and children) resembling the posts of
Kurtz's Station.[6]
[edit] Duality of human nature
But theory is one thing, practice is another. Idealism, which has a Utopian quality, is inappropriate in a world
where corrupt interests abound and where there are many who go on all fours. The last sentence in the report, an
added footnote--"Exterminate all the brutes"--refers us to the dark other side of his personality, "the soul satiated
with primitive emotions"; it shows a descent and that his "civilizer's" concern for the distressed savages has turned
to hatred. Of particular relevance is the significance of the portrait he has painted, the blindfolded torchbearer
against the black background which could suggest (among other things) the simplicity of the ideal and the
complexity of reality, the illusion of light and the truth of darkness. The monstrous prevails and the human and
artistic potential miscarries. There is a downward tug in Kurtz's involvement with the wilderness and he descends
into a brute existence. He is reduced to madness and his aggressive impulses take control of him.
[7]
To emphasize the theme of darkness within mankind,[7] Marlow's narration takes place on a yawl in
the Thames tidal estuary. Early in the novella, Marlow recounts how London, the largest, most
populous and wealthiest city in the world, was a dark place in Roman times. The idea that the
Romans conquered the savage Britons parallels Conrad's tale of the Belgians conquering the savage
Africans. The theme of darkness lurking beneath the surface of even "civilized" persons appears
prominently and is explored in the character of Kurtz and through Marlow's passing sense of
understanding with the Africans.
Kurtz embodies all forms of an urge to be more or less than human. His writings show in Marlow's
view an "exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence" and they appeal to "every altruistic
sentiment." His predisposition for benevolence is clear in the statement "We whites...must
necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings....By the simple exercise
of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded". The Central Station manager
quotes Kurtz, the exemplar: "Each station should be like a beacon on the road towards better things,
a centre for trade of course, but also for humanizing, improving, instructing". Kurtz's inexperienced,
scientific self in the fiery report is alive with the possibility of the cultivation and conversion of the
savages. He would have subscribed to Moreau's proposition that "a pig may be educated".[7]
Themes developed in the novella's later scenes include the naïveté of Europeans (particularly
women) regarding the various forms of darkness in the Congo; the British traders and Belgian
colonialists' abuse of the natives and man's potential for duplicity.[8] The symbolism in the book
expands on these as a struggle between good and evil (light and darkness), not so much between
people as in every major character's soul.