Ladies and gentlemen, today I want toceremoniously recommend you a great moviethat towers over everything that has been attempted by an American filmmaker in a very long time.33 years after it was first shown, the 1979 American epic war film Apocalypse Now continues to fascinate scholars, critics and viewers as a cultural phenomenon, a media event rather than simply a Hollywood movie.It is considered to bethe best Vietnam film, at once a noble use of the medium and a tireless expression of the horrorand the national anguish of war.Now let me introduce to you its basic information, the aspects of the Vietnam War it reveals and its profound influence on Americanculture as well as ideology.
Let’s start with its basic information.This 200-minute-long movie Apocalypse Now is a set during the Vietnam War, directed and produced by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall and Martin Sheen. It is a successful adaption ofthe famous book Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, which is an enigmatic story about the cruelties of colonialism in Congo.The central character in the movie is US Army special operationOfficer Captain Benjamin L. Willard ofMACV(Military Assistance Command Vietnam). Hewas sent asan assassin to follow the Nung River into the remote Cambodian jungle, find and 'terminate with extreme prejudice' the US Special Forces Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, who wasonce considered a model officer and future general butlater went insaneand was commanding his own Montagnard troops inside neutral Cambodia, leading his tribesmen on random genocide missions.
When it comes to the aspects of the Vietnam War it reveals, first comes its condemnation of the atrocity of war. Ladies and gentlemen, question: do you know what the word apocalypse means? The word apocalypse refers to any End Time scenario or to the end of the world in general.Alternately a brilliant and bizarre film, Cappola’s masterpiece Apocalypse Now offers the definitive validation to the old saw, "war is hell." The atrocity of the Vietnam War just indicates the Apocalypse of the world.As Captain Willard approached Kurtz's outpost, he saw the coastline was littered with bodies, severed heads were scattered about the nearby temple that serves as Kurtz's living quarters. The purposeless brutality of the war, the absence of military leadership, and the imagery of machinery destroying naturerepeatedly reflectsthe film’s anti-war theme.
The second aspect of VietnamWar it reveals is the absurd inanities of the American involvement in Vietnam.Willard is drawn to the jungle's primeval mystique and power, only to realize that the horror and savagery lie not in the jungle but within American culture itself. The atrocities and of Kurtz’s camp is in effect the microcosm of the brutalities of the American government.Everything about the Taliban, al-Qaida, the pressures that took American people into Afghanistan and Iraq, the assault on Abbottabad and the deadly troubles that lie ahead are to be found here in Willard's journey.It's the first film to directly excoriate US involvement in the Indochina war. To be sure, inhumane attitudes surfaced on both sides as inevitable consequences of a misunderstood conflict, but Coppola wields a wide brush in painting Americans as either "conspiratorial" or "homicidal," with no one in between.
Finally, Apocalypse now exerts profound influence on American culture and ideology. By using the unique iconography of Vietnam: helicopters, disposable weaponry, rock music, acid drugs, psychedelic sensibility, the film offers a candid, operatic view of America's longest and most tumultuous war. It calls for Americans’philosophical inquiry into the atrocity of war and the absurd dominance of the US government. On the review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes, Apocalypse Now has a 99% "Certified Fresh" rating, with an Average Rating of an 8.9/10. Also the quote in the movie "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" was number 12 on the AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movie Quotes list and has been widely used in TV shows, radios, movies and daily talks.
Ladies and gentlemen, watch this movie and I am sure you will never regret.。