Apocalypse Now / Heart of Darkness

When Joseph Conrad sat down to write Heart of Darkness over a century ago he decided to set his tale amidst his own country's involvement in the African Congo. Deep in the African jungle his character would make his journey to find the Captain gone astray. Over eighty years later Francis Ford Coppola's Willard would take his journey not in Afica but in the jungles of South Asia. Coppola's Film, Apocalypse Now uses the backdrop of the American Vietnam War yet the similarities between the Conrad's novel and Coppola's film remains constant and plenty.

In 1899 when Conrad first published his story in Blackwood's Magazine the British Empire was the dominant global empire. To the common British man or any British man the emblem of savagry was indeed the place they deemed as the "Dark Continent" of Africa. The people that lived there had an entirely different style of living that did not involved the "civilized" methods of the British empire. The natives had not the manners, clothing, technowledgy nor skin color of Conrad's people. The environment in which they lived of much difference then the British isle. It was hot, humid, dense, exotic filled with dangerous creatures and most of all it was foreign. When Francis Ford Coppola began work on his film Apocalypse Now the dominant power in the world was no longer the British but the United States of America, the same state that was coming off a bloody war fought in Vietnam. To Coppola's United States Vietnam was b...