The early set-up stages of Apocalypse Now began in the late 1960s, but due to delay after delay (role changes and other massive organizational issues) filming did not begin until 1975, the same year as the end of the Vietnam War. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, the film was based off of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, adapted to become a portrayal of Vietnam.
The film was written and created to demonstrate the pure chaos of war and the fracturing of the mind that it caused in so many soldiers. As Coppola himself put it at the Cannes film festival:
My movie is not about Vietnam… my movie is Vietnam.
Coppola felt that this film needed to be made, regardless of the years of setbacks, in order to help the United States move on after the war. It is one of the first films responding to the Vietnam War to have come out, and since it was originally written and intended to be released much sooner, it is considered a direct and immediate response to the war.
In Roger Ebert’s review of the film, he wrote:
Apocalypse Now achieves greatness not by analyzing our ‘experience in Vietnam’, but by re-creating, in characters and images, something of that experience
The film shies away from the realism that one might expect of it, though. Rather than going for an exact portrayal of the grit and grime that was so characteristic of the war, the creators of the film used lighting, sound, camerawork, and setting to keep a surreal atmosphere.
War and Social Change 