Revealing the Heart of Darkness in Apocalypse Now Often a novel shot as a film deviates from the original story, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. However, many great literary works have inspired films and served as the basis for a great film, even if film may approach literature differently. This is the case of Apocalypse Now by Francis Ford Coppola, inspired by Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Coppola and screenwriter John Mileus took a story written nearly eighty years earlier and used its underlying theme of man's inner darkness and the idea of ​​traveling down a river into the unknown to tell the story of one of darkest and most confusing chapters in American history: the Vietnam War. Coppola's edits to Heart of Darkness serve to exemplify his general point, namely that US involvement in Vietnam was itself a descent into the "heart of darkness". Coppola managed to make a film with such a theme for an American audience that was still dealing with Vietnam. The film was released five years after the last troops had finally left Vietnam, and the American public was still wondering what had been accomplished and why we had been involved, while the troops who had served there were haunted by the memory of the horrors that they had seen. , and were also left wondering how much it was all worth. Coppola found a story in Heart of Darkness that dealt with the same themes of darkness and confusion and applied them to Vietnam to accomplish the task of demonstrating the darkness that was the Vietnam War. Coppola uses the basic plot structure and theme of Heart of Darkness to convey the message that America was wrong in the Vietnam War, and comes... middle of paper... saw the darkness of a bloody war, a confusing war that certainly corresponded to Conrad's colonialism, but which also showed that every man's inner darkness was still at work in the world. It shows that war is ultimately just a manifestation of that darkness. As Mike Wilmington says in his article "Worth the Wait: Apocalypse Now," "It's a quest... toward death and dissolution. Coppola probably... couldn't explain what that quest was intended to find" (288). With Apocalypse Now, Coppola walked a winding and unclear path into the heart of darkness. Works Cited Chatman, Seymour. "Two and a half versions of Heart of Darkness." Corrado on cinema. Ed. Gene M. Moore. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.Wilmington, Mike. “Worth the Wait: Apocalypse Now.” Heart of Darkness, Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1988.