Appreciating the Equivalence: Marlow and Willard (Comparison of "Apocalypse Now" to "Heart of Darkenss")

Francis Ford Coppola, the screenwriter of the film "Apocalypse Now," created the film based on Joseph Conrad's novella, "Heart of Darkness". However, the overview of the film is totally different from the context in the novel. The whole movie takes place during the Vietnam War in the year 1979, while the book sets off during the Belgian colonialism in early 1900s. Willard, equivalent to Marlow, kills Kurtz at the end while Marlow tries to save him. …

…everything belonged to him"(Conrad, 49). His evilness is his greed inside of him that enables him to goes insane. Coppola paralleled both two works in many aspects, but, to distinguish from the book as he wished, he added his own interpretation into the end of the movie because, as stated by Coppola, "the ideas of what Kurtz represents are so big that when you try to get a handle on them they are almost indefinable".