Apocalypse Now
Speaking in retrospect about his 1979 film, director Francis Ford Coppola once said, "Apocalypse Now is not about Vietnam, it is
Vietnam." Coppola was referring to the imm...
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Critical Essay by David Denby
Apocalypse Now is about Americans in Vietnam, and its themes are the perversion of the natural by the technological and the eerily sensuous beauty of war, in which the ni...
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Critical Essay by Andrew Sarris
[For] all of Coppola's emotional involvement in [Apocalypse Now], it is a remarkably cold film. Coppola undoubtedly felt strongly about the Vietnamese War, but t...
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Critical Essay by Veronica Geng
Viewed as a conventional updating of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" … "Apocalypse Now" looks like not much more than a ca...
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Critical Essay by Michael Wood
[Apocalypse Now] ends in a welter of bathos that has to be seen to be believed, and that weighs down the whole work with its mournful freight of clutching, unappeasable ...
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Critical Essay by John Tessitore
Toward the end of Francis Coppola's "Apocalypse Now," the camera casually, almost randomly, roams across a disheveled hut, passing a small number ...
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Critical Essay by Michael Dempsey
Apocalypse Now seeks less to meditate on the war and more to plunge us as viscerally into it as any movie possibly can. Structurally, it is a river movie the way Easy...
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In the following essay, Hagen analyzes the relationship between Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and concludes, "I tend to see Apocalypse Now as a fa...
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In the following essay, Hellmann traces how Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter and Coppola's Apocalypse Now use different American genres—the western and the hardboiled detective, r...
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Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" and the movie "Apocalypse Now" are both stories about a man's exploration of his own self and what he finds there. Both Marlow and Willard are forewarned about the...
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Francis Coppola's movie, Apocalypse Now, is based loosely upon Conrad's book, Heart of Darkness. They both represent the weak human nature that can get easily dominated by the horror around us and as ...
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