Who is marlow in apocalypse now

Also, he does not use imagery of any sort - the strong, red-eyed devils and the flabby, weak-eyed devils from the book are not mentioned if Willard were Marlow, he would have admonished the army leaders in Saigon for being flabby devils, for example , nor does he have any of the fascination with shoes and other arbitrary objects and ideas that Marlow seems to.

Willard also has no qualms whatsoever about killing, whether it be innocents the girl on the trading boat or Kurtz himself; in the book, Marlow had an abhorrence towards killing. These are mostly unavoidable differences, due to the different settings. Were these changes not present, then Apocalypse Now would have been horribly off-balanced,.

Get Access. Read More. I am now a little more open to watching an older, black and white film. I am also more likely to select a foreign film with subtitles. I am more willing to watch a black and white film but only if it is directed by Alfred Hitchcock or Orson Welles. Open Document. Essay Sample Check Writing Quality. Comparing Marlow of Heart of Darkness and Willard of Apocalypse Now Whenever books are adapted for film, changes inevitably have to be made.

The medium of film offers several advantages and disadvantages over the book: it is not as adept at exploring the inner workings of people - it cannot explore their minds so easily; however, the added visual and audio capabilities of film open whole new areas of the imagination which, in the hands of a competent writer-director, can more than compensate.

However, rewrite it Francis Ford Coppola did, altering the time and place of the novel from 19th century Congo to 20th century Vietnam. Coppola made an original film, with concepts and ideas taken from Heart of Darkness, rather than making a straight film version of the book. Consequently, there are many similarities and differences between the film and the book.

The character of Marlow is renamed Willard in Apocalypse Now. This is noteworthy; the character of Kurtz has the same name in both the text and the film, so why not Marlow?

Kurtz is the person who has disconnected himself from society; he is not tied to any particular era, so his character works just as effectively in the 20th century as in the 19th. However, Marlow is the ordinary person in Heart of Darkness - the one ordinary man in the entire book, more-or-less; he is what ties the book into the society of Canby, Vincent. Conrad, Joseph. Urch, Martin. Get Access.

Although Milius made drastic changes, he left the basic structure intact: a man travels upriver to face an evil genius and, along the way, must face his fears, his mortality, and the possibility that he will go slowly insane. Coppola decided to shoot Brando from the waist up to give him the appearance of being enormous and superhumanly tall without seeming fat. As both Marlow and Willard make journeys up their respective rivers, they witness unthinkable atrocities.

Heart of Darkness is a searing indictment of imperialism. Apocalypse Now similarly indicts the American presence during the war in Vietnam, which is seen by its critics as yet another version of western imperialism.