Apocalypse Now (Analytical/SPOILER Version)

For those that look at this blog be sure to know this post has major spoilers.

Within the movie Apocalypse Now there is a realism that deems it the title "great" instead of just impressive. Apocalypse Now does not show it's theme and central message through the dialog but rather through the actions and cinematography.

At the beginning, there is a battle in a village, and the theme of war and how destructive and terrible war is just lashes out at the audience. In order to encompass what war really is there had to be an element of terrible grandness. In the first battle scene there weren’t close ups, there was no main character just fighting on his own like a James Bond film, or Casablanca, or Saving Private Ryan, but rather there was a large fight. Explosions were everywhere. People were dying left and right and to see all of it was a terrifying but awe-inspiring shot. After that they prepare audience to react to Kilgore. Colonel Bill Kilgore is a man that is gun ho about killing and gung ho about gore and gung ho about the "smell of napalm in the morning." They prepare the audience to scowl and to wonder why he loves to fight and kill via this large scene of killing and destruction upon those that seem innocent (the Vietnamese women and children). As the war rages on, there is a broken church in the background. The depth of focus is not on the soldiers in this one scene, but rather on the church, making the brokenness and the sadness of war only a little more real.

Another part of this barbarism within war is not only within this small but symbolic picture but also there are more subliminal decisions (and I’m not talking about the two phallic symbols within the course of the film). The more subliminal decisions are the ones with the tiger stripes and the incorporation of that color scheme within the film. The tiger first appears in the scene where Chef and Willard are out of the boat. Within the jungle a tiger jumps out of the forest and starts to attack and at first they run away from the forest and barbarism and tiger. Later they embrace it and even Roach has a gun that has tiger stripes. There’s face paint with green stripes and there’s more animalistic qualities to each person as they enter into the jungle more and more. Purple haze is introduced as the haze between what is human and what is animalistic in war starts to get hairy and blurred.

At the end of this whole movie, camera angles also take a role in how the cinematography conveys the theme. The camera angles shows Kurtz, when Willard first finds him in the darkness, at a high angle so that Kurtz looks hunched like an animal. He rubs his head and mumbles and the whole time people want to see him but the camera angles and the lighting and the color of the whole frame prevents us from seeing him truly. As the movie progresses we see less darkness in him and we see more of his face. The movie ends at last with the camera angles showing Willard up high and Kurtz down low as Willard kills Kurtz like the natives kill a caribou ceremonially. The whole thing is bloody and barbaric and yet it conveys the theme so much. As much as the movie is unsettling, that was the main theme and the point of the movie in general. I love how elegantly Kurtz puts war in the end when Willard kills him via the knife.

“The horror…the horror…”