Apocalypse Now

Is aggression and primal zombie instinct of war a responsibility bestowed upon us from our country, or a moral corruption within us as humans? It’s an open ended question with multiple answers. The human condition or soldiers through destruction and toxic masculine nature doesn't just stem from that human male nature, but something seemingly inhumane and greater, hard to describe: an apocalypse of war. War is an apocalypse not only because of its chaotic nature with bombs away and gins firing without stop, but because of us zombies ourselves. Soldiers, specifically the ones depicted in this one are reckless zombies under a trance - relentlessly killing and attacking without the moral grounds to question the right and wrong of this. War is indeed a field obviously included with the need for kill, but what point does it go overboard, where us as men of war have instinctive violence we desire and take pride in doing rather than see it as an obligation. The young men fighting in this war are depicted as happy and willing to kill, waving their flags and celebrating their kills, smiling while they pull the trigger and release the canon. While it’s inherently beneficial to wipe out all war competition, it’s not good for tactic. They rely on impulsion and natural aggression rather than a tactic to win and spot the heat around the corner. They’re so excited to fire a trigger at their opponents, forgetting that there needs to be a plan beyond that. The eventual decline of them is tragic, but inevitable. They say they want to defeat and be war ready for a corrupt leader, but in the process aren’t much better than that ruthless leader themselves. Everyone on all sides of the battlefield are ruthless, impulsive, without rationality apes and zombies, mindlessly running around for kill and tapping into inner aggression and desire for the worst because of the mission and country pride to save a nation. Colonel Waltz is more evil than these troops we follow, but also cut from a different cloth of evil. He doesn’t only see war crime as an obligation and necessity he owes to his country, but something he’s indented into his soul. He believes it’s a must to always have the upper hand against enemies and those trying to defeat you, or else you will become the one defeated. This is even worse than the war ideology of taking pleasure and desire in kill. He knows what he’s doing, and he believes it’s the only moral code to go by to succeed in not only war, but in his life and his place in the world as a man and a reckless animal. Coppola shows story mastery in the film by showing the complexities and genres of innate human evil and our instincts of irredeemable sin, growing within us from the murky environments like war and blood infested waters of battle. The film single-handedly immerses you into the hell of a day’s work in the jungles of chaos, with cinematography ranging from beaming bright sunlight to muddy green and brown air polluted by debris and smoke of war’s remains. The edit lingers in on any types of tension in the atmosphere, using careful shot selection and cuts to the hellscape of the natural world in the jungles and islands ruined by the violence.