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Overview
Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 epic war movie Apocalypse Now is loosely based upon Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, transporting the novel’s setting of 19th-century Congo to the Vietnam War
. The film stars Martin Sheen as Benjamin L. Willard, an American army captain who has been assigned to travel from South Vietnam to Cambodia in order to assassinate Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, an officer in the Special Forces who has gone “rogue” and no longer answers to his superiors. Despite costly production difficulties and ambivalent initial reviews by critics, Apocalypse Now did well at the box office and is now often listed as among the greatest films ever made. Retrospectively, film critics have lauded Apocalypse Now for its unflinching portrayal of the Vietnam War and the far-reaching psychological effects of combat.
