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 environments. Both characters were very much out of place in a strange, foreign environment and were pushed to the edge. 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. Vietnam was probably chosen as the setting for Apocalypse Now because it represents modern-day darkness. In both cases, the men travel upriver towards Kurtz on a boat. In Apocalypse Now, a character by the name of Willard parallels the ...