FAQ for
Apocalypse Now (1979) More at IMDbPro »

The following FAQ entries may contain spoilers. Only the biggest ones (if any) will be covered with spoiler tags. It is assumed that no one who is diligently avoiding spoilers will be visiting this page in the first place.

This movie is based on the novella "Heart of Darkness", published by Joseph Conrad. Before its 1902 publication, it appeared as a three-part series (1899) in Blackwood's Magazine. It is widely regarded as a significant work of English literature and part of the Western canon.

This highly symbolic story is actually a story within a story, or frame narrative. It follows Charles Marlow as he recounts, at dusk and into the evening, his adventure into the Congo to a group of men aboard a ship anchored in the Thames Estuary.

The story details an incident when Marlow, an Englishman, took a foreign assignment as a ferry-boat captain, employed by a Belgian trading company, on what readers may assume is the Congo River, in the Congo Free State, a private colony of King Leopold II; the country is never specifically named. Though his job is transporting ivory downriver, Marlow quickly develops an intense interest in investigating Kurtz, an ivory-procurement agent in the employ of the government. Kurtz has a reputation throughout the region.

"He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision - he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath - '"The horror! The horror!"' T. S. Eliot's use of this famous quotation from Heart of Darkness as an epigraph to the original manuscript of The Wasteland places Mr Kurtz, the ambiguous anti-hero of the story, at the dark heart of the twentieth century.

Conrad is an exceptionally difficult author to read. Many of his sentences run on for an entire paragraph. However, it is very rewarding.

The water buffalo was being slaughtered by the Ifugao people you see on film for their own (ritual) purposes. They are a tribe that were used as the extras in the Kurtz compound. The crew filmed the event, so they were merely documenting, not staging it.

The differences between the Redux and the original version can be found by clicking: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalypse_Now_Redux#New_scenes.2Falterations Or by checking out this website where a detailed comparison with pictures can be found.