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DWill · Junior Joined: 31 Jan 2008 Posts: 306 Gender:

I've finally watched "Apocalypse Now," as I rashly promised I would about a month and a half ago. If there is anyone there who has seen it (Ophelia I know has) and would like to discuss, I'm ready. My wife says she believes Martin Sheen had a heart attack during the filming. I don't know if that's true, but the film is so intense that it's not hard to believe.
DWill

Ophelia · Posted: Sat May 17, 2008 1:14 am Post subject:

Saffron · Posted: Sat May 17, 2008 3:17 am Post subject:

DWill wrote:

DWill · Junior Joined: 31 Jan 2008 Posts: 306 Gender:

Holy cow, that was good digging, Saffron. At least one of the actors--Sheen-- didn't have to get into character to play the deranged special ops guy, he was there already. I noted that F.F. Coppola had a cameo in which he was filming soldiers as they landed on a beach, yelling at them not to look at the camera.
The film did what you'd expect of a good adaptation, paralleling the original story (HD) in certain ways while ringing interesting changes on it. Change just a few elements and you have a new twist on Conrad's tale. The most important of these was to make the Marlow figure more of an avenger than a rescuer of Kurtz, and an anti-hero as well. He kills a wounded Cambodian woman and brutally murders Kurtz. But he is still the closest thing to a moral voice in the comletely amoral world of the film.
What most interested me was the function and interpretation of the words "the horror, the horror." We know these were spoken in HD by Kurtz as he died. I have viewed these words as Kurtz's realization of the depths he had sunk to, and as the factor that redeemed him in Marlow's eyes. In "Apocalypse," Col. Kurtz's first utterrance of "horror" occurs as he is explaining to Willard/Sheen how one must conduct war if one is to succeed. He said a commander must have moral men under him that are willing to do anything, no matter how abominable, to achieve the objective. That is what Col. Kurtz clearly had learned to do. One must use horror against an enemy, that was the secret. When Kurtz is dying and says the word twice again, it's as if he's repeating this lesson learned, not indicting himself for what he did.
The Army wants Col. Kurtz out of the way, it seems, not because of his "unsound methods", but because he has set up an independent operation that has been too successful. Conrad's Kurtz needed to go for a similar reason.
A question we discussed in relation to HD was whether what happened to Kurtz can be called cracking or going insane. The general says this is what happened to Col. Kurtz under the influence of the jungle. In both treatments, I see something else happening. Cracking doesn't explain the deliberate use of genius for quite horrific ends. The two Kurtzes didn't crack but in a sense blossomed in an evironment in which there were no restraints on them.
I'm glad I did finally watch this film again. When I saw it in 1978, it may have made little impression on me, as hard as that is to believe now.
DWill


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