The whirring of a ceiling fan resonates with the force of a helicopter, and dissolves shift from close-ups of Willard to artifacts of his personal life to glimpses of an inferno. Amplified by a series of dexterous, intuitive choices in picture and sound editing, the scene illuminates Willard’s inner self. The plot closely tracks the book upon which Coppola and John Milius’ screenplay was inspired, Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness: Willard is directed to ferret out and then “terminate with extreme prejudice” Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), an officer of unsound mind who has stationed himself in Cambodia.įollowing the film’s opening shot, we find Willard in a hotel room in Saigon, hungover and disoriented. As the Doors’ song “The End” dominates the soundtrack, the screen is overtaken with a fireball engulfing a mass of deep-green trees.īut while Apocalypse Now is set in a jungle battlefield, its actual terrain is the soul of Captain Willard (Martin Sheen). Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) opens with a bang that befits its subject: the Vietnam War.
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