The movie Apocalypse Now is an extremely fitting example of someone adapting and changing an old masterpiece such as Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” to create a new one in its own right and also using a different medium. Although the movie version Apocalypse Now is based on the “Heart of Darkness”, it is not a filmed version of the story. The setting has been changed to make it more appropriate to the present. The film has used Vietnam as the setting, when America tried to ‘tame’ the Vietnamese communists, whereas in “Heart of Darkness” Conrad used the Congo and the colonialists and traders who went there to tame the locals and exploited them. In the process, both sets of intruders entered into the dark recesses of their own minds. Both the movie and the novel have the same underlying themes; however, the plots, characters, setting, time, purposes and points of view differ enough to create two extremely different effects. Conrad’s ideals are not lost from his book to the movie Apocalypse Now. Both portray the ideals of good vs. evil and purity vs. darkness.
In “Heart of Darkness” and Apocalypse Now, both the characters Marlow and Willard were driven to their breaking points by the harsh realities of their environm
. . .
His mission is to travel to Cambodia and assassinate Kurtz. Why did the wilderness affect the two so differently? One of the reasons might be that Marlow is a sailor. There is an implication that societal rules and regulations do protect us from ourselves. In “Heart of Darkness”, the journey to find Kurtz, who is an ivory trader who has gone deep into the jungles of Africa in search of ivory; while in Apocalypse Now, Kurtz is a high-ranking officer in the military who has disobeyed orders and is now fighting the Vietnam war in Cambodia with his unit. He is the central figure of the novel, character-wise and story-wise. Both the story and the movie provide excellent insight into the madness of men, the insanity of the situations, and the emotional changes that result from the traumatic journey. Both the movie and the book portray the same journey into the jungle and inescapably into each characters self. So he joined in the new one and became their leader. Kurtz in both cases gave into a territory where he was not disciplined by the rules of ‘civilization. The whole adventure had affected him so greatly that he had aged and matured into a wiser man. But when he found the book of seamanship just near the station of Kurtz, he says:
“a delicious sensation of having come upon
something unmistakably real. A movie usually will draw a big crowd this way. He had taken the ‘journey into eternity’ and we are shown the results of this journey on him from the very beginning of the book:
“He had sunken cheeks, a yellow complexion…” p. 44
Kurtz had gone into the wilds and had given in to it partly because there were no restraints imposed on him by society.
Approximate Word count =
1391
Approximate Pages =
6 (250 words per page double spaced)
Simply subscribe to view this paper, and 100,000 others.
| CREDIT CARD |
ONLINE CHECK |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
JOIN BY PHONE
|
|
|