Comparing Apocalypse Now by Franice Coppola and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad :: Literature Francis Coppola Joseph Conrad Essays

Comparing Apocalypse today by Franice Coppola and shopping center of Darkness by Joseph Conrad Francis Coppolas Apocalypse Now was inspired by Joseph Conrads novel Heart of Darkness that informs the film throughout. A similitude and contrast can be made between the two. Both find the like themes but entirely different settings. Heart of Darkness takes dwelling house on the Congo River in the Heart of Africa while Apocalypse Now is set in Vietnam. The stock characters in both have the same general personalities but have different names. Of course, Kurtz is Kurtz, Willard par every(prenominal)els Marlow, and the American photojournalist corresponds to the Russian Harlequin. Willard is a lieutenant for the US Army and Marlow is a captain of a steamboat of an osseous tissue company. The first images of Willard and Marlow differ to some degree. The movie begins with Willard lying in an flatcar room lost from reality with the song The kibosh playing by The Doors. He is haunted by his earlier deeds and he is get very drunk. Willard smashes the mirror while fighting himself and cuts his hand. He collapses on the have it away weeping. Marlow is portrayed as a wanderer of the sea. The narrator described him to passably of a hero. Their mission is to find Kurtz and take him down at all costs. In both stories Kurtz is a psychotic rebel, moralityped as a god, who threatens the stability of his original unit, but in one it is an ivory craft company and in the other it is the US Army. Kurtz, who had begun his assignment a gentleman of great idealism and the highest morals, had become strangely savage. Tribes of natives worship the man who lives in a hut surrounded by fence posts topped with late acquired human skulls. Kurtz has undergone a total breakdown of the physical, psychological, and spiritual. Along the trip into the wilderness, Willard and Marlow take their true selves through contact with savage natives. As Marlow ventures further up the Congo, he f eels like he is traveling back through time. He sees the unsettled wilderness and can feel the darkness of its solitude. The movie ends quite differently than the novel. The movie ends with a spectacular scene. During a native clans ritual sacrifice ceremony of a water buffalo, The Doors The End playing on the background, Willard finally kills Kurtz with a machete. Willard exits to find the natives begin to worship him.