PAB Apocalypse Now Redux BLOG 8

Appocalypse Now! Redux, direted by Francis Ford Coppola, is a long and allegory fueled film with Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" providing the backbone. In the end, both the film and the book leave the audience with a strong message; War will take you to such a dark place within yourself that you once thought could not exist but is a place from which you cannot escape. Both Captain Willard's and Marlow's journeys act as an allegory to this. As Willard makes his way into Cambodia, the presence of evil obviously grows. The journey into the darkness of the jungle represents a soldier's journey into the darkest part of his own soul. While the journey down river is the main allegory in Apocalypse Now! Redux, there are also many more.

A motif present in the film is one of the false motivations of the American forces in Vietnam. Instead of fighting for the appropriate causes, soldiers did their best to separate a serious attitude from their presence in the war. Before Willard makes his way to Captain Kilgore, he is confused to find filmmakers shooting film of the battle scene. The idea that images of actual war are dramatized for entertainment purposes is just another example of the false motives of the American forces. Only 30 minutes into the film, Captain Kilgore is helping a Vietnamese man who is holding his own intestines in, but immediately ignores him as he is enthralled to discover a professional surfer in his force. From that point on, his primary objective was to wipe out the Vietnamese forces in order to go surfing. The soldiers who are stuck in war will abandon anything they have in order for any sort of escape.

The search for escape is present in all of the soldiers in this film. For example, Captain Willard trades the boat's fuel supply for his soldiers to spend an hour with the Playboy bunnies. Although they give up their supply of fuel, they get moments of escape. They are allowed to fulfill their greatest fantasies. This fuel was spent on the soldiers' movement away from the "heart of darkness"; the very place that this fuel was supposed to bring them towards. When Willard's boat makes its way to a bridge ruled by anarchy, one of the soldiers, Lance, drops his last amount of acid before he runs into the fray. He paints his face, carries a puppy in his jacket, and smiles as he walks through his acid trip in a dangerous battlefield. While in a place of true human darkness, he uses all of his resources to escape from it. It seems as though this slip into the heart of darkness is inevitable during wartime, but human nature causes us to do our best to fight this slip.

The scene where Lance takes acid while walking around with a puppy has another allegorical aspect to it. This bridge area has nobody in charge. Captain Willard encounters many places where there is no leadership. Willard often asks "Who's in charge here?", and every response reveals that nobody knows. These scenes represent the lack of effective leadership by American forces. Effective leadership in this case means that which practical or not corrupt. The scenes in the film that include bases where there is no leader, the soldiers are acting in unethical and foolish ways. Some are taking drugs, launching grenades pointlessly, pulling pranks on others, or wasting resources. Without leadership, the soldiers' labor is being put to waste. Clearly, this is an allegory about the leadership among the American troops as a whole.

Apocalypse Now! Redux is a very long film that uses Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" as the foundation to build smaller allegorical stories upon. In the end, the book and the film have very similar points to make about one's 'heart of darkness'. While Conrad’s book tells a simple story about a trip into the darkness of one’s soul, Apocalypse Now emphasizes on the connection between that journey during the Vietnam War.