Movies & TV

This might be a strange one but 'Apocalypse Now' has one thing in particular for me that's completely inexcusable. Mainly that, for a film supposedly based on Heart of Darkness, a book that is very clearly critical of imperialism and racism, it completely inverts its message.

Like, on the face of it, it's anti-war, and even anti-US in that the US Army is shown as completely dysfunctional, run by cold-blooded psychopaths like the COs at the start who set Martin Sheen off to "terminate with extreme prejudice" or brain-fried madmen like the helicopter commander who just wants to surf, and it's shown how much damage and devastation the US has caused for no tangible gain (but then again, only in a 'why are we even here' type 'oops, the US accidentally stumbled into another war' kind of way).

But the whole film is from the perspective of the US, the Viet 'Cong' [sic] are never shown to be real people, just a nebulous menace lurking out of sight, and every sequence of the 'madness of war' is dripping with glorification of it. I mean, maybe this is shouldn't be a surprise, because it was written by John Milius, the guy who wrote Conan the Barbarian and fucking Red Dawn, but there's no way the film that contains the Ride of the Valkyries helicopter sequence can be said not to glorify war. It's like if the Starship Troopers film, while still supposedly intending to be a satire, was written by an actual fascist instead.

So in Heart of Darkness, when Marlow finds Kurtz, he's this emaciated, pathetic figure, who has gone insane in the wilderness of his ivory trading post and turned the area into his personal playground, cowing the local tribes with his guns and putting the heads of 'rebels' on pikes - and okay, the Africans are kind of passive and servile, but given that the novel was written in 1899 and the European colonialist is depicted as this savage, disgusting wretch it has to be given some credit. At best, he's a victim of his own power in a place where that makes him a god, and the natives of that place are his victims.

But in the film, Kurtz is a larger-than-life dominating presence, whose goal is not to fuck around in his personal kingdom but to keep fighting the war. When Marlow meets him after being captured, Kurtz gives a monologue (video), where he describes seeing a pile of children's arms that have been cut off. In real life, the Belgians committed horrific crimes like this against the Africans, but in Apocalypse now, the children had received vaccines from the US, and because of that their arms were cut off by Vietnamese soldiers. And that serves as the basis for his outright fascist screed about the power of will and shamelessness and the primordial instinct to kill and a bunch of other grade-A John Milius bullshit. And yes, the film presents him as insane, but more than that it presents him as a victim of the brutality of the colonized people resisting their oppressors.

That's an absolutely fucking unconscionable change to make and turns the whole thing inside-out. The horrific conditions of life for the Africans shown in Heart of Darkness were a paraphrasing of real historical crimes actually committed by real Belgian colonist monsters. Taking inspiration from that novel, but making the colonized people into the perpetrators of that crime is absolutely unforgivable and renders the whole film into true fascist apologia. Literally, utterly unforgivable.