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Apocalypse Now

#16 User is offline   Gobbler Icon

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Posted 12 May 2006 - 01:50 AM

Oh yeah, the Apocalypse Cow game followed after that... ahh, good times, good times...

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Pop quiz, hotshot. Garry Kasparov is coming to kill you, and the only way to change his mind is for you to beat him at chess. What do you do, what do you do?
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#17 User is offline   J m HofMarN Icon

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Posted 15 June 2006 - 12:32 AM

Civ- I read Heart of Darkness because of this very topic, and I have to say that both the film and the book were successes. You left out a great many good points of Apocalypse Now when you went after it. Let me address both the book and the film here.

Heart of Darkness-

Heart of Darkness was, necessarily, muted. I think the name of the book, especially clear in the end, refered to London, seat of the British Empire, as the heart of darkness. This showed a great deal of forethought. This was written before it was known widely that millions starved in India thanks to Britain. It was written half a century before the empire collapsed.

At that time you couldn't come right out and say "You're a bunch of bloody racist twits and you're raping the world" In fact, Conrad scarcely characterized the African natives at all. Not to say he was wrong in doing so, I mean that was the understanding of the day. Even the idea that they were above animals was a dangerous proposition, so Conrad was clearly making strides in the right direction.

However the difference is that, though both works are critical of wars against peoples whom the rulers of the respective nations believed to be inferior ("negroes" in one case and "gooks" in the other) the difference is that the war in Vietnam was an overt war, and thus needed a different approach. The war against the Africans was a war of colonization, a slow paced war. There were no great and impressive gunbattles, just the shadowy worn out forms slowly dying under the shade trees which Conrad so vividly described.

Now as for Apocalypse Now, the character of Kurtz had to be a bit muddled, since he was completely out of the context he existed in in Heart of Darkness. In Heart of Darkness he's a businessman in a savage business who declines into the open exp​ression of what the business really is, and thus thrives only to renounce it all in a moment of clarity.

In Apocalypse Now, he's a killer who does too good of a job of it. A colonel isn't supposed to hold to the same ideas of decency and conduct as a station manager in the ivory trade. He's supposed to kill people. I think that's why they made the extra push towards showing him as completely batshit. The protagonist's murder of Kurtz, who, let us not forget, was an efficient killer in the service of the US, could be portrayed as his rejection of Kurtz' mission, rather than acceptance of his own.

Now as for the condemnation of the Vietnam War that you feel is lacking, there is plenty of it.

What about the scene where they attack the boat and slaughter an entire family for trying to conceal a puppy? That for me was more poignant than what happened in the village.

The village scene however is also telling. The lone and heroic Vietnamese woman giving her life just to kill a few of the invading soldiers had me for one completely in her corner. I think that was also a great bit of film making and I hope I wasn't the only one cheering her on. Did the film makers intend on this reaction? I think so. Otherwise why write the character as a woman and have her gunned down in the end?

And there's also the statement that the Vietnamese soldiers actually believe in something, I believe it was Kurtz talking about how they subsisted on a diet of rats and rice, and that he wished he had soldiers like that. There is not a single incident in the film that I recall which paints the Vietnamese resistance as the villains.

I think the spirit remained the same, so I believe Apocalypse Now was true to the book in that respect.

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I don't know about you but I have never advocated that homosexuals, for any reason, be cut out of their mother's womb and thrown into a bin.
- Deucaon toes a hard line on gay fetus rights.
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