Apocalypse Now

* This review contains heavy spoilers from the second paragraph onward. Read at your own discretion. * Apocalypse Now is certainly the best war film of all time and perhaps even the greatest film ever created. Watching the Final Cut version on the big screen created an experience of absolute intensity that placed me inside a world where humanity is portrayed as a place of madness and suffering. The film presents a sustained philosophical investigation into the moral and political foundations of human society and stages the confrontation between several traditions of thought whose origins belong to early modern and modern philosophy and political theory. The journey of Captain Willard up the Nung River dismantles Hugo Grotius’s belief in natural sociability, realizes Thomas Hobbes’s state of nature, and fulfills Niccolò Machiavelli’s idea of political necessity. It then reaches Joseph Conrad’s recognition of the façade of civilization and concludes with Nietzschean revelation of the death of God. Francis Ford Coppola’s narrative gives these theories a visual and dramatic form and reveals their limits through the figure of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz. Hugo Grotius believed that law and arms could exist together because of the rational and sociable nature of humanity. In On the Law of War and Peace he described human beings as possessing an innate impulse for organized and peaceful life in community. This trait of sociability, socialitas, forms the foundation of natural law. Reason identifies this law and preserves it as a universal and immutable standard. Even in war this natural law governs human conduct and determines what actions are permissible as enemies remain members of a single moral community bound by shared norms. Apocalypse Now presents a systematic refutation of this vision. The film exposes Grotius’s system as an illusion that cannot survive the conditions of modern war. The massacre of the Vietnamese on the sampan annihilates the concept of socialitas. The crew acts through fear and suspicion rather than reason or moral judgment and fire without certainty, killing noncombatants through the Hobbesian instinct of self preservation. Chief’s attempt to restore moral order by helping the wounded woman ends when Willard executes her so that the mission can continue. This single act transforms Grotian natural law into Machiavellian reason of state as Willard selects necessity over law and action over morality, and demonstrates that Grotius’s belief in a moral community among enemies cannot withstand violence. Law and arms exist in fundamental opposition, and Willard’s act expresses the logic of a world in which moral principles have ceased to function. The Playboy Bunny show repeats this philosophical lesson, as the soldiers, stripped of discipline, return to instincts of primal aggression and possession. The social order dissolves and the show becomes a reflection of the collapse of Grotius’s civilized humanity. Apocalypse Now demonstrates that the philosophical foundation of Grotian international law disintegrates under the reality of war. Thomas Hobbes replaced Grotius’s belief in sociability with an account of human conflict. In Leviathan Hobbes described the state of nature as a condition without a common power to restrain men. In this condition life becomes a perpetual war of all against all driven by competition, diffidence, and glory. Diffidence, or fear, compels men to strike others in order to protect themselves. The constant fear of violent death destroys industry, culture, and community and produces a life that is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. The Do Lung Bridge sequence in Apocalypse Now provides the visual realization of Hobbes’s theory, in which the bridge becomes the state of nature. There is no commander, no structure, and no order. Soldiers fire in every direction without purpose. Explosions, light, and confusion fill the screen. When Willard asks, “Who’s the C.O. here?” and the soldier answers, “Ain’t you?” the film captures the collapse of authority and the desperate human desire for a sovereign. The men at Do Lung lack leadership, and they also lack the linguistic and moral foundation that authority requires. Hobbes believed that peace depends upon language as authority exists through words and promises, and that thus, the sinews of the state are speech and command. Apocalypse Now presents the disintegration of this linguistic structure. In Saigon, officers speak in the controlled vocabulary of command and bureaucracy, but by the time the crew reaches Do Lung, speech has broken down entirely into sound and noise. In other words, orders no longer create action and the scene illustrates Hobbes’s idea that the state of nature is also a state of linguistic collapse. When the common power disappears, language ceases to bind men together. The chaos of Do Lung Bridge prepares for the arrival of Colonel Kurtz. Hobbes wrote that men escape the state of nature by conferring all power upon a sovereign who holds absolute authority. This sovereign becomes a mortal god who replaces fear with awe. Machiavelli wrote that the prince must reject moral illusions and face the effectual truth of power. To master fortune he must use will and violence when necessity demands it. Kurtz embodies both traditions and his compound represents a restored order in miniature. His followers have entered an implicit covenant that gives him absolute command. The severed heads surrounding his temple function as the visible signs of coercive power that express order rather than madness. Within his territory there is no visible conflict as perpetual war has been transformed into the awe of a single will. Kurtz also in a way fulfills the role of the Machiavellian prince, as his reflections on horror express the insight of Machiavelli. In his account of the Viet Cong who cut off the inoculated arms of children, he identifies the will that acts without moral restraint and praises their strength because they acted without hesitation. For Kurtz this act reveals the effectual truth of politics. The American generals remain trapped in imagined republics of law and morality, while victory belongs to those who act according to necessity. The horror becomes the measure of political effectiveness. His transgression arises from his honesty as he has removed the pretense that once separated Grotian morality from Machiavellian realism. The novella the film was inspired by -- Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness -- provides the framework that brings these philosophies together. Conrad described civilization as a façade built upon a primitive foundation. Law, morality, and social order operate as external constraints rather than as expressions of inner virtue. When these restraints vanish, the civilized man returns to his original condition. The wilderness reveals that the entire structure of civilization rests on an artificial foundation. The French plantation sequence in the Final Cut version illustrates this idea completely. Conrad’s novel functions as a critique of the moral hypocrisy of colonialism. He described colonialism as a Grotian deception in which the idea of a civilizing mission conceals the reality of Machiavellian conquest. The French plantation reproduces this deception, appearing as an isolated artifice of nineteenth century civilization amid a brutal war. The patriarch, Hubert de Marais, embodies the memory of a failed empire. He defends the French claim to the land by invoking the language of conquest, and his statement that the French fought for and built the land expresses Machiavellian truth. He contrasts the French project with the American mission that he considers empty and describes the Americans as fighting for an imagined republic of freedom and democracy that refuted communism, while the French fought for property and survival. The scene connects the old European colonialism of Conrad’s Congo with the new American war in Vietnam. The entire history of Western involvement becomes a series of collapsing façades of law and morality. The French family remains as ghosts within an artifice that has lost meaning. Kurtz perceives this hypocrisy and creates a new pagan order that acknowledges power as its only foundation. The culmination of Kurtz’s philosophy belongs to Nietzsche. In Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche rejected moral systems derived from Christianity and natural law. He distinguished between slave morality, which elevates humility and obedience, and master morality, which affirms strength and will. The death of God signifies the end of absolute moral authority, and the Übermensch represents the individual who transcends good and evil and creates values grounded in the will to power. Kurtz embodies this transformation when he becomes a modern pagan god. He rejects the slave morality of the generals who hide their will to power behind moral justification, establishes a master morality in which horror and will replace goodness and law, and his compound functions as a new moral order built upon personal will. He accepts the state of nature and dominates it, with his authority being both political and moral. He creates meaning in a world where universal law has disappeared. The film presents the cost of this new moral world, where his order depends on the subjection of others, and where his transcendence of moral categories produces emptiness. The famous last words of the film, “the horror, the horror,” express Kurtz’s realization that the new pagan morality, though coherent in thought, destroys the humanity it claims to liberate. The structure of Apocalypse Now follows a complete philosophical progression. The film begins in Grotius’s world of law. It passes through the Hobbesian state of nature. It enters Machiavelli’s realm of necessity. It reaches Nietzsche’s will to power and concludes with Conrad’s understanding of civilization as a façade. Willard’s assassination of Kurtz repeats the collapse that the film has traced. He kills the mortal god and no higher law emerges. Authority and meaning disappear together. Apocalypse Now operates as a philosophical allegory that examines the failure of modern moral and political foundations. Grotian law proves powerless in the face of violence. Hobbes’s sovereign collapses beneath the force of war. Machiavellian realism endures without moral direction. Conrad’s vision reveals the darkness underlying all human systems. Nietzsche’s creation of new values transforms into worship of horror. Coppola’s dialogue with these thinkers yields one conclusion: the structures that claim to civilize humanity remain temporary. When they fall away, only the state of nature, the will to power, and the horror that Kurtz names continue to exist. The philosophies that once promised order end in silence. Power and fear remain as the enduring truths of human existence. The horror represents the recognition that these truths lie at the foundation of every human order. 101 Story & Pacing: 20/20 Characters & Acting: 20/20 Themes: 50/50 Cinematography & Editing: 5/5 Soundtrack & Sound: 5/5 Memorability: 1/1