The movie "Apocalypse Now" has many similarities to Joseph Conrad's novel, "Heart of Darkness". The movie takes place during the Vietnam war in Saigon and the main character, Willard, was assigned a mission to kill a colonel named Kurtz because he has lost his mind and is dangerous. The book, "Heart of Darkness" takes place during the time of the Belgian Congo and the main character, Marlow, also aspires to find a powerful man named Kurtz. Both Marlow and Willard take on command of dangerous and difficult journeys and the book and the movie are both depictions of the main character's recall of the events that occurred.
In Apocalypse Now Kurtz was once described as a brave soldier who deserved a lot of respect and somewhere along the line lost his mind and order the assassination of four people. In Heart of Darkness Kurtz is a mysterious character who no one really knows much about. This is similar to Kurtz in Apocalypse Now because Kurtz is difficult to find and the main character is told to keep his mission to kill Kurtz a secret.
Both Marlow and Willard look grimly back on their experiences leading a team down the river. The characters both do things that they now regret looking back. Both settings have violent natives as an obstacle as well as many other similar dangers along their journeys. The diseases and dangers that Marlow and Kurtz encountered in the Congo are similar to those that probably caused Kurtz to eventually go insane. In my opinion the movie Apocalypse Now effectively captures many details and concepts and follows a similar story line to Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness, but each of the works also have their own individual differences. The movie highlights a lot of the violence that might have been more difficult to imagine through reading the book. Even though the settings in the book and movie were different seeing the immense violence that was present in the movie helped me to better imagine the atrocities that Conrad described in his novel.
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