Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Vietnam War film, "Apocalypse Now," tells a vivid, gruesome, realistic, and terrifying story of one of America's worst battles just after it ended in 1975. The film uses beautiful cinematography along with superb sound mixing, soundtracks, and a huge budget to recreate the Vietnam War as closely as possible. Ford chose his shooting location in the Philippines as it closely resembled Vietnam with its similar jungle lined beaches, hot sticky climate, and the fact the he could easily transport in American equipment all while paying cheap Philippine labor cost. Coppola created this film with "ambitious effort to show Vietnam as America's Heart of Darkness, with Joseph Conrad's story providing the narrative skeleton" "(Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 1-1) and many themes, meanings, and entire scenes from the movie do in fact come directly from Conrad's book. .
Aside from the adaptation of Heart of Darkness's story into the film Apocalypse Now illustrates the hardships of war in nearly every aspect of a soldiers life. The movies story is told through the personal narration and point of view of the protagonist Captain Willard is played by actor Martin Sheen. Willard is recruited on a classified mission to capture a renegade special ops soldier in Cambodia, and amongst this journey up the Nung River the horrors of war unfold. The combination of sounds and the songs throughout this film give the story a rich value between reality and illusion, which is the underline basis of the destruction that war leaves upon a soldier. Ford's use of imagery, darkness, and slow and long cross dissolves also create vivid realizations of the damages inflicted by war both physically and mentally. The use of fog, haze, drugs, and alcohol also all relate to the same extremely crucial element of illusion and reality throughout the film. Just as Author German Vargas say in his analysis of the film "The combination of fact and fiction is the main goal of the film" "(Vargas, 98).
