John Milius’s original screenplay moved Joseph Conrad’s 1898 novella Heart
of Darkness from colonial Africa to the heart of the Vietnam
War in the late 1960s. Although Milius made
drastic changes, he left the basic structure intact: a man travels
upriver to face an evil genius and, along the way, must face his
fears, his mortality, and the possibility that he will go slowly
insane. Director Francis Ford Coppola in turn embellished Milius’s
screenplay to make it more closely mirror Conrad’s book, cutting
scenes, adding others, and demanding a great deal of improvisation
from his actors. Milius and Coppola therefore shared the film’s
screenwriting credit. Author Michael Herr, who wrote a notable collection
of Vietnam War articles entitled Dispatches, also
received a writing credit for penning the film’s narration.
In addition to switching the setting, Milius renamed or
modified nearly all of Conrad’s characters (aside from Kurtz). Conrad’s
protagonist, Marlow, a pensive sailor on a quest to meet the ostensibly great,
multitalented thinker Kurtz, becomes Milius’s Army Captain Benjamin
Willard, an emotionally scarred Special Forces operative on a classified
mission to terminate Kurtz. Milius’s Kurtz was an outstanding military
officer who has apparently gone crazy. As the film opens, he leads
a small colony in Cambodia, relying on “unsound methods” for imperious
control. Moreover, Kurtz as portrayed by actor Marlon Brando is
drastically different from the Kurtz of Conrad’s novella. Brando’s
portrayal was influenced by his own corpulent, imposing physical
presence, which contrasted greatly with the appearance of the emaciated
Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. Conrad’s Kurtz withers
away in the jaws of the jungle; Brando’s Kurtz is broad and large,
with an imposing, sinister presence. Coppola decided to shoot Brando
from the waist up to give him the appearance of being enormous and
superhumanly tall without seeming fat.
As both Marlow and Willard make journeys up their respective rivers,
they witness unthinkable atrocities. In Marlow’s case, the scenes
of torture and slavery can be attributed to European imperialism.
Willard’s story, on the other hand, requires him frequently to participate
in the atrocities himself, as they are part of the war he is fighting. Heart
of Darkness is a searing indictment of imperialism. Apocalypse
Now similarly indicts the American presence during the war
in Vietnam, which is seen by its critics as yet another version
of western imperialism. In both stories, operating beyond the constraints
of civilized society for an extended period leads to insanity. Reality
in the novella and film is transformed into a cloudy surreal landscape
where what is moral is gapingly unclear, moral judgment is no longer
possible, and the very nature of humanity is challenged.
Coppola and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro translate
the updated novella beautifully onto the screen, playing out the novella’s
titular darkness visually through shadows and light-dark contrast.
Joseph Conrad’s vivid descriptions of the Congo jungle jump into
the film in the tiger scene, as Chef and Willard cower under mammoth
trees. The fog that pervades the novella also features prominently
the film, most notably when Willard emerges from the river at the
film’s climax.
Milius’s original screenplay was structured with narration,
but this narration was discarded during filming. Sound engineer
Walter Murch, however, added his own voiceover during sound editing, because
he felt the film lacked structure. Eventually, Michael Herr, a journalist
who spent a year in Vietnam, later publishing his writing as Dispatches, was
brought on to replace Murch’s narration. Herr’s work tells the story
through Willard’s eyes and gives the film an intimacy and organization
that otherwise would not exist. This narration humanizes Willard,
making him more sympathetic and the story more comprehensible.
