>From the Congo river in Africa to the Nung River in Vietnam, Joseph Conrad's ideals are accurately demonstrated through the movie Apocalypse Now, directed by Francis Coppola. Although both compositions have completely different settings and were written at different time periods, Coppola does not lose the ideas of good and evil, whiteness and darkness, racism, and irony that Conrad interprets in his book. Both stories reveal man's heart of darkness, in other words, their journey into their interior self, and confrontments with their fears and failures, insanity, and death. By profoundly analyzing specific scenes of Coppola's movie and assimilating it to passages of "Heart of Darkness" we are able to depict similarities as well as differences between both accounts. Both Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now begin in a first-person voice of a man narrating. In the novel, the anonymous narrator indicates that we are aboard a cruising yawl. As Marlow looks over at London at its height of civilization, he comments that "This also has been one of the dark places of the earth. (Conrad, 5 )," serving as a foreshadowing to all the evil and darkness imperialism has also caused among the African society. The chaos caused by the European presence in Africa.
Francis Coppola's version of the story is narrated by Captain Willard, who starts telling his story in his small hotel room in Saigon. Inside the room Willard's mind feels complicated and disturbed. "Each time I look around the walls seem tighter." His mind's voice is dense and dull as he ponders over the awkward feeling the room enforces on him. The impression of being in a dark tenuous room with the walls moving in demonstrates the same feeling of being trapped in the dense forest of the novel which he knows it's mysterious and dark and the grasp for survival. The call for someone to save him from all this wickedness that is overcoming him and the insanity that it taking him to...