Meighan Byron: reaction to Apocalypse Now
It most definitely is both an anti war film and a pro war film.
Why it is a pro war film? It is the comradery shown at the beginning of the movie. A young Lawerence Fishburn dancing around the boat, showing that he was having a good time. As a young man without the rules of society, as a young man living both an extremely dangerous yet carefree and silly existence. Dancing around the boat playing, with guns, getting a sun tan and surfing. The most pointless of hobbies; surfing and sun tanning are shown as glamorous wartime activities.
The horrors of war: the charred bodies of people, the stacks of people reminiscent of the holocaust, only they weren’t put their by Nazi’s, but by Americans. Copolla wanted to show the audience that we too are the monsters that we claim to fight and vanquish.
The director also tried to bring home the horror of the war. He does this in a clever way. When Willard is given the order to terminate the command of Kurtz, he is brought into a normal looking home. Just like a setting that you would have found in an average American home in the 1960’s. Comforting, familiar, heck the army even provided a ‘Sunday Dinner’ style meal. In this way the audience at the time would have felt at ease in the beginning of the movie and gotten more uncomfortable by the end. Brilliant.