Review of Apocalypse Now

Contrary to grandiose orchestral openings often heralding apocalyptic events, Apocalypse Now commences on a deceptively quiet, contemplative note. The first few seconds show lines of lush palm trees gently swaying in a breeze, accompanied by quiet sounds of nature that eventually dissolve into the chopped noise of rotating helicopter blades before an army aircraft appears on the upper half of the screen. The audience quickly comes to realize that both the visual images as well as the sound do not bode well. This insight is intensified by another helicopter streaking across the screen as well as by copious amounts of smoke drifting upwards and a sudden increase of noise. When the jungle explodes into fiery balls of napalm, Jim Morrisons oddly calming This is the end highlights the complex ambiguity of the topic, the Vietnam War and the United States involvement in it, and it forecasts the circular evolvement of the story-line. As we are presented with an upside-down close-up of Captain Willards head which is superimposed over the jungle, images of the overhead fan merge with the helicopters rotating blades. Thus, Coppola not only draws attention to the protagonists precarious state of mind but also intimates the reversed perspective he is about to present on the Vietnam War, alternately focusing on the ideals to be retained and the atrocities committed in any war. By making the jungle eventually dissolve into a giant Buddha head set next to Willards, Coppola augurs Willards almost mystical obsession with Colonel Kurtz and the outcome of his journey up-river. From the very beginning, the film draws heavily on recurring visual imagery such as smoke, fire, religious symbols and items of warfare, in order to confront the nightmarish aspects of the Vietnam War and to emphasize the various degrees of insanity major characters in the film fall victim to at some stage. This gradual build-up of individual madness is best visualized in the slow transformation of the clean-cut surfer-cum-soldier into a warpainted drug-addict, who moves through the war as if in a trance , but also makes up a part of Willards character. While obsessing about him, he sees a reflection of his own madness in Kurtz , only at a more acute stage.
1

Review of Apocalypse Now

Coppola does not hesitate to point an accusatory finger at miscellaneous instances of violence committed by the US troops during this war, as depicted in Kilgores random annihilation of a seaside village for the sake of surfing or Willards cold-blooded shooting of the wounded Vietnamese woman on the sampan. He also makes time to zoom in on the absurdities of war as manifest in psychotic Colonel Kilgore in cavalry hat and yellow ascot, the entertainment circus of the US troops, the harlequinesque photojournalist played by Dennis Hopper or quite early on, the brief interlude when US soldiers are filmed for the news-reel back home, pretending to be engaged in active combat. The beginning of the film finds Captain Benjamin L. Willard, drunk in a seedy Saigon hotel room, closed off from the outside world, clearly struggling to come to terms with the depressing void between assignments. While Willards behaviour in that hotel room is bordering on self-destruction, it is also symbolic of his eagerness to divest himself of the straightjacket of civilization. The CIA agent is soon dispatched on a covert mission to assassinate Colonel Kurtz, a decorated war hero gone rogue to wage his own war after having killed some Vietnamese double agents. He has set up a small empire amid the Montagnard tribe in the Cambodian jungle where he enjoys godlike status. For Kurtz termination, Willard is ferried down the coast and then escorted to the mouth of the (fictional) Nungh River by Colonel Kilgore and his chopper squad during an intense air-strike. From this point onwards, Willard and the multi-racial crew of the patrol boat embark on a mystical journey upriver that consists of a series of episodic encounters loosely strung together by Willards monotonous voice-overs. After a sudden confrontation with the animal dangers of the jungle, followed by a brief, but memorable stop-over with USO Playmates and a stint at mock warfare, all vestiges of civilization and humanity gradually break away. When during a routine search of a Vietnamese boat, all the boat people are killed due to Willards cold-blooded execution of the wounded survivor there is a decisive break in
2

Review of Apocalypse Now

the narrative flow of the film, which is visually transported by a screen suddenly going black for an uncomfortable stretch of time. Shortly after the crew has reached the last US outpost before the Cambodian border, all pretence of American superiority is suddenly gone. In screen sequences that are dominated by bizarre light effects as well as a cacophony of primeval sounds of pain and terror meshed with merry-go-round tunes and beats of rock music, the lunacy of war has suddenly taken centre-stage. The film is given an even more hallucinatory dimension by means of lavishly employed apocalyptical images. After more attacks farther up-river, in which crew members are killed, Willard, Lance and Chief, ultimately reach Colonel Kurtz's outpost, which delivers a visual punch in its macabre, modern-day rendering of Hades or Dantes Inferno. When Willard finally meets with Kurtz he becomes witness to the extent of Kurtzs retreat into his dark and splintered self. He is initiated into Kurtzs world by primitive native rituals and after carrying out the final part of his assignment, leaves the compound together with the sole survivor of the crew. Apocalypse Now follows the epic convention of ancient katabasis, in which the protagonist descends into a supernatural or dystopic region on a specific quest, usually to rescue a friend, to bring back a quest-object or to return initiated, as in gifted with heightened knowledge and perception. This concept is inverted here, since the journey is undertaken to kill a renegade US officer. Willards descent into Kurtzs pagan world is interspersed with rotational patrols and flanked by encroaching jungles, bridges and borders, which are typically employed in ancient mythology to define the borders between one world and the next. The patrol boat that takes Willard farther away from civilization, both with regard to a geographic and a symbolic dimension, is the vessel of ancient myth used for ferrying the souls of the dead. In Apocalypse Now, it is piloted by an African American, who embodies both, Charon, the ferryman of Greek mythology and Hermes, the god who guides the souls of
3

Review of Apocalypse Now

the deceased to the ferry. The fact that he is killed before Willard and his men reach their destination, underscores the inverted nature of this narrative. Concerning plot and structure, the film draws heavily on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, specifically on the second half of the novella, although Coppola introduces significant changes concerning setting, events and characters. Both, Conrad and Coppola send their narrators and protagonists on a river journey: Conrads Marlow travels up the Congo River in search of a Mr Kurtz, a once brilliant and idealistic fellow agent in the ivory trade, who, due to his personal hubris, has turned into the demonic and ruthless god-king of a cannibal tribe. Far away from the confinements of civilization, Conrads Kurtz has given up his soul for the sake of bloody sovereignty, which he justifies as visionary quest. By the time both protagonists meet their targets persons, those former golden boys have lost their spectacularly positive qualities, among them their muchvaunted eloquence which has been toned down to identical gasps of death. During his journey up the river and back, Conrads protagonist witnesses the horrendous crimes committed in the name of colonialism in the Belgian Congo, which double for the atrocities Coppola has his protagonist witness on his voyage. Both, Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness broach the dichotomy of barbarity and civilization, with the imperial powers believing they embody civilization and the indigenous people representing savagery. The price of civilization, according to Conrad, would be the savagery of colonialism, whereas Coppola does not put American colonialism in a larger historical context but feeds the audience a twisted portrait of active colonialism in Kilgores literal attack on a continent, in the destruction of a Vietnamese village. He does not need to enslave natives to subdue the wilderness of the jungle - he just kills them and tosses playing cards on their corpses. Apocalypse Now is indebted to other works of literature as well, such as T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and also, as a brief camera pan on the copy of the book insinuates, to James Frazer's mythological work of reference, The Golden Bough, to name a few.
4

Review of Apocalypse Now

As becomes obvious from one of the final scenes of the film, Apocalypse Now is not only about death but also about resurrection. The ritual killing of a water buffalo by the Montagnards is intercut with Willards hacking Kurtz to death, symbolically rendering Kurtzs death a sacrifice on the altar of American politics. By completing his mission, Willard, In a manner of speaking, has been resurrected from his catatonic, dead-to-the world state of existence at the beginning of the film. As he leaves Kurtzs compound in the dead of night, however, a final close-up of his mask-like camouflaged face fills the screen and it becomes crystal clear for the audience that although purged and enlightened by his quest Captain Benjamin L. Willard will not return to the civilised world as ancient mythological heroes like Hercules or Ulysses did, psychically sound and unaffected by what he has experienced. Willard survives as a reflection of Kurtz , refusing to replace Kurtz as a false god, but echoing his dying words of horror. Apocalypse Now does not offer a complete picture of the Vietnam War or a convincing anti-war statement, but an appropriate rendering of the US experience of the Vietnam War as yet another crisis of national identity.

Review of Apocalypse Now

Bibliography
Dempsey, Michael "Apocalypse Now," Sight and Sound, 49/1 (Winter 1979/80), pp. 5-9 The Anti-Experience as Cultural Memory: Francis Ford Coppolas Apocalypse Now and the Vietnam War, IN: aspeers 6 (2013), pp 55-78 Traces of Transgression in Apocalypse Now, Social Text, No. 3 (Autumn, 1980), pp. 123-135 Coppola's Conrad: The Repetitions of Complicity, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Spring, 1981), pp. 455-474 Hearts of Darkness: making art, making history, making money, making 'Vietnam', IN: Cinaste, Vol. 19, No. 2/3, 25th Anniversary Double Issue (1992), pp. 24-27

Fehlhaber , Svenja

Hansen, Miriam Stewart, Garrett Worthy, Kim