Apocalypse Now: Key Facts

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Full title: Apocalypse Now

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Leading Cast: Martin Sheen as Captain Benjamin Willard, Marlon Brando as Colonel Kurtz

Supporting Cast: Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper, Albert Hall, Frederic Forrest, Laurence Fishburne, Sam Bottoms

Writers: John Milius, Francis Ford Coppola

Producers: Francis Ford Coppola (credited as Francis Coppola)

Genre: War film

Language: English

Date of release: 1979

Awards

1979 Academy Awards:

Nominee: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor in a Supporting Role, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, and Best Sound.

Won: Best Cinematography, Best Sound

Setting (time & Place): Vietnam,1968

Foreshadowing: The film opens with helicopters lurking ominously over the jungle, accompanied by the Doors’ moody song “The End”; Chef and Willard encounter a tiger when they venture off the boat to look for mangoes; Willard murders the Vietnamese peasant woman in the sampan; Lance smears his face with paint like the members of Kurtz’s army.

Major conflict: Willard must struggle against the horrors and hypocrisies of war and the darkness within himself to complete his mission and kill Colonel Kurtz.

Rising action: As Willard works his way upriver to Kurtz, his target, he faces and participates in several of the war’s atrocities and absurdities, including a preemptive air strike on a Vietnamese village, a seedy USO show, and an attack on innocent Vietnamese peasants in a sampan, leading him to realize fully the futility of war and question whether he will complete his mission and kill Kurtz, a man whom he has come to admire and emulate to a disturbing degree.

Climax: Willard’s mud-covered emergence from the river cements his Kurtzlike transformation and signals that he has given in to the dark side of his nature and will murder Kurtz in a ruthless, ritualistic fashion.

Falling action: After murdering Kurtz, Willard is given the opportunity to replace the colonel as a godlike figure. In rejecting this opportunity, he rejects the acceptance of human evil as king.