Apocalypse Now

E

I haven't sat down and watched all of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) for a long time. I feel like saw the whole thing a while ago, and then continually saw bits of it on TV and whatnot. I'm glad that I was able to watch this again now, after college. Majoring in English, I studied T.S. Eliot a lot, so when Kurtz reads from "The Hollow Men" and when Dennis Hopper's character, the photojournalist, references "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", I got so much more out of this film. I finally understood what they were referencing, since I studied those poems so in depth during college. Here is the most embarrassing thing I will ever say an as English major - I know that this movie is based on Heart of Darkness by Joesph Conrad. It is hard, I know, to avoid reading this novella. I have never read it. I'm currently reading it on my nook/iPhone, but I'm working through it. Yikes! Some of the nuances of this film are still probably lost on me, being still in the middle of Conrad's story.