Blog Assignment #4

     Apocalypse Now, 2001, has many similarities to the novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. The movie is merely a representation of the book. The movie is set in the middle of the Vietnam War. It is an interesting choice of location to bring across the meaning of the novel. The movie holds nothing back in terms of graphics it captures the horror of the Vietnam War and the horror of the novel. The scenes that are the most similar between the two is when the helmsman (in the book), and the soldier driving the boat (in the movie).

    A similarity between the helmsman and the soldier is that they both drive the boat that Marlow/Captain Willard, ride on down the rivers. The precise scene that resembles the most to the novel is the death scene of the helmsman and soldier. They die relatively the same way. Both were killed when the natives attacked the boat. A spear was what killed them. However, the manner in which they died was somewhat different. When the spear struck the helmsman in the novella, he and Marlow had a connection, an almost brotherly bond.  There was a form of connection that had formed between them after the long period of time on the boat together.  They had a connected moment right as the helmsman was dying that was not the same in the movie. In the movie the soldier driving the boat was killed in the same way, but the main difference is that the “moment” that happened in the book was much different in the movie. In the movie a spear killed the soldier the same way as in the book, but as he lay dying he grabbed Captain Willard and tried to pull him towards the spear through his chest as if to kill Willard. The moment was so shocking it was almost not to be believed. The movie “moment” was so much more intense than the book. It was odd to see the soldier want to kill Willard, it sparked many interesting questions as to why he would want Willard dead in the first place. He had argued with Willard about not going further up the river towards the dreaded Colonel Kurtz, but he was determined to follow his orders to kill Kurtz. His mind was in that set and so it can be stated that Willard’s actions caused the death of the soldier, therefore causing him to want to kill Willard. Conrad chooses to show that there was a deep connection between the helmsman and Marlow, while the movie displayed an almost menacing behavior between Willard and the other soldier.

Apocalypse Now, Redux 2001