The Heart of Darkness of film.

Rating: 10/10 (14 August 1999)

Apocalypse Now is to film what the Heart of Darkness, the Joseph Conrad novel on which the film is based, is to literature. The film is no more about the madness of Vietnam than the book is about the anarchy of the Belgian Congo, Coppola's genius was to transport the film into a setting as dark and mysterious to the American viewer as the darkest river in Africa, under the most chaotic colonization, was to Conrad's contemporary reader.
What the film is about - of course - is the madness and the anarchy that exists within the heart of man. Darkness, Kurtz, Apocalypse, Willard, are all a part of every man. The oft repeated criticism of the film for its general murkiness, and particularly its vague and disturbing ending miss the point of the film. When Willard finally kills Kurtz, nay, butchers him, as the parallels to the butchery of the water buffalo show, he is no longer, as he says, "in their army." He has become a disciple of the mad Colonel, and is now following his orders. He has left the relative sanity of drunken rage in a Saigon hotel room and become a part of the spiralling madness that exists in the jungle of man.
Kurtz' singular genius, Willard finally realizes, is that he - unlike the "four star clowns" who run the war - truly understands "the horror" in the heart of man, and there is only one escape from that horror. Kurtz's mad scribblings, "Drop the bomb, exterminate them all" reveal what he has discovered, that his desire is not merely his own escape from the madness, but the escape of all, the Apocalypse Now.
As Willard leaves the temple, he too is worshipped by Kurtz' followers, for he too has seen and understands The Heart of Darkness, and as he escorts the ignorant Lance away, who like most men can only gaze in wonder upon that which he does not understand, Kurtz's last warning is repeated, something which Willard cannot escape in his PT boat, for Willard now truly knows "the horror, the horror".