Appreciating the Equivalence: Marlow and Willard (Comparison of "Apocalypse Now" to "Heart of Darkenss")

Essay by rexrodejUniversity, Bachelor'sA+, March 2006

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Francis Ford Coppola, the screenwriter of the film "Apocalypse Now," created the film based on Joseph Conrad's novella, "Heart of Darkness". However, the overview of the film is totally different from the context in the novel. The whole movie takes place during the Vietnam War in the year 1979, while the book sets off during the Belgian colonialism in early 1900s. Willard, equivalent to Marlow, kills Kurtz at the end while Marlow tries to save him. It was said that he wanted to show his own interpretations of the book via his distinct story, however, in those contrasts, which we can easily perceive from his distinct "Apocalypse Now"; there are a great many similarities. The success of his interpretations is clear. The equivalence portrayed by Coppola of Willard to Conrad's character, Marlow, is significant in the sense that the differences presented in the film actually build upon the similarities in an, at first, non-direct fashion.

Also, if we look through deeper meanings in every detail of the film as well as the novella, we can find that both the novella and the film convey the same symbols and perspectives at the same, specific parts of the works. We come to understand that both works unfold their stories chronologically similarly from the first part until the end.

The ideals behind "Apocalypse Now" became a metaphorical backdrop for the corruptive madness and folly of war itself in Vietnam for a generation of Americans. Francis Ford Coppola described his own motivation in the making of the film "to create a film experience that would gives its audience a sense of the horror, the madness, the sensuousness, and the moral dilemma of the Vietnam war." The lyrical, slow-moving opening sequence is a combination of cinematography, music and hallucinatory images from the brutal and...