This is the end, beautiful friend

Apocalypse Now by Francis Ford Coppola

Apocalypse Now is a Vietnam War film, released in 1979. Directed and produced by that wonderful man Francis Ford Coppola that also directed The Godfather.

This movie won 2 Oscars back in the day and with the time it got considered as a cultural and historical movie and also taken by the National Film Registry for its preservation.

The film is about the story of the Captain Benjamin Willard (Played by Martin Sheen), that is sent to Cambodia to find Colonel Kurtz (Played by Marlon Brando). Colonel Kurtz has gone crazy and took his unit deep in the jungle, and now the colonel is revered as a God.

So Willard joins to a unit keeping the mission as secret, this is where we meet Colonel Bill Killgore (Played by Robert Duval, very very very good acting by this guy). Willard's unit needs a boat to travel down the river and fin Kurtz but first they got to attack a Vietcong village. The best scene in all the movie

After this, they got the boat and travel down the river.

The journey to madness

Like Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy the river is the way to hell, the more they advance more horrors there will be. This is a nice example about the quote "War is hell" 'cause it fucking is.

In this travel the unit finds:

• A tiger.
• An US Marines storage where playboy girls had a show.
• A bridge being attacked by an invisible enemy.
• A french family with a house on the banks of the river.
• Colonel Kurtz camp.

Meaning

Horror! Horror has a face, and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies.

How comes an eminently intelligent man like Colonel Kurtz, with high ideals, to become a monster? For that is an answer that the film shows in a superb way through its narrative. Serving as allegory, to point out the great evils of progress, which in the interests of a better world justify the greatest horrors. For, although it was men like Kurtz who carried out such atrocities, they were, above all, encouraged by the culture of those who believe better than others, and which is still in force in the west. Among those who are flying the discourse of freedom and the social, they are really just looking for the economic benefit. Something that is masterfully enunciated when Kurtz tells Willard:

Colonel Kurtz: Are you an assassin?
Capt. Benjamin Willard: I'm a soldier.
Colonel Kurtz: You're neither. You're an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill.

In short, Apocalypse Now is a film that gradually traces the inner soul of characters to the limit that represent a world in chaos. A journey to the madness of Western society and its warmongersic chimeras. A reflection on what makes us human and what we lose when we want to be that for which we are not born. But it is in this contradiction in which the so-called free world lives, a contradiction that the Colonel himself already expresses in the madness of a sharp mind: "You need men who have morals but who, at the same time, can use their primary instincts to kill , without feelings, without passion, without judgment, without judging. Because it is the judgment that defeats us. "

What Kurtz says here, is neither more nor less what seem to believe some or many of our leaders, that in pursuit of objectives that are now known impossible, persist in entering the horror, in that heart of darkness that rejects good judgement , the reason, the love, the peace, the fraternity, and in short, the best that humanity can give.

We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won't allow them to write "fuck" on their airplanes because it's obscene!

This is how this post ends, see you next time! :)