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, respectively—to portray two different interpretations of the Vietnam War.

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 failed masterpiece, another instance of the fact that the production-editing process cannot bear too much of the conceptual load in a feature film."

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 Rider is a road movie, a succession of events and set-pieces. The characters are quite simple; apart from Willard and Kurtz, hardly any register for more than a sequence…. The shot of the chopper in the tree quotes from a similar image in Aguirre, Wrath of God, a boat high above the river which looks like a mirage to the conquistadors. ...

Viewed as a conventional updating of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" … "Apocalypse Now" looks like not much more than a cannibalization. For better and for worse, the movie confirms the idea that a work of art consists of local particulars. To use somebody else's work of art as a skeleton, you first have to turn it into a skeleton. Where "Apocalypse Now" is least successful (the last half hour), it seems to have been made by people who have ...

Toward the end of Francis Coppola's "Apocalypse Now," the camera casually, almost randomly, roams across a disheveled hut, passing a small number of scattered books lying in such a way as to suggest recent usage. One of these books is Sir James Frazer's "The Golden Bough." It is no accident. Indeed, this book holds the key to understanding the conclusion of the film that has baffled—and annoyed—most critics and will very likely be unsettling a number o...

[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 ambition. But the film holds together well enough until it reaches its final muddle, and it has scenes and moments unequaled in recent European or American movies. Indeed, it has one long sequence so right and so powerful that it actually causes the confusion of the end, since it leaves Coppola with nothing to say. He cannot discover the pro...

[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 the vehicle for his feelings is constructed in such a way that none of the characters can project them. Hence, the characters tend to be either animated cartoons (vide Robert Duvall's Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore) or ciphers (Brando's shadowy Kurtz)…. [If] two-thirds of the film are great, and one-third problematical, is not...

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 nightmarish all too easily becomes commonplace. The images are not intended to be totally subjective or surreal; they are meant to illustrate the very real stages of demoralization—the rituals of defilement—that marked America's self-destruction in Vietnam. Apocalypse Now feels like one of those doom-laden pieces by the G...