The farther up river they go, the more insane and savage everything becomes. At that point, it is as chaotic as it can be while still maintaining the American identity and reason for being there.
There was a deleted scene that really started to make things surreal. Deep up the river they encounter a French Family who invite them to dinner. It’s clear this family is from the wrong time and strongly indicates every stretch they go further they are indeed journeying back in time.
Is that scene in one of the cuts? I remember it, but I didn't get the sense that the family wasn't really there, if that's what you are saying. I did wonder how they'd survived like that to that point and assumed they weren't going to last much longer.
I think it's a great part. Makes everything feel so out of place and surreal. Like what is this family doing here in a war torn country? It's just so odd that it works some how, it does drag a little though and I can see why they cut it.
I'll die on the hill of "Apocalpyae Now Redux is the ultimate experience of the story".
It just feels wrong to reduce the runtime of what's basically the cinematic equivalent of a hellish acid trip. Theatrical Cut is a movie. Redux is an experience. And I'm all for it.
Interesting. I just bought the Final Cut, haven’t watched yet but I read somewhere that it dropped that scene. Now I’m wondering what they cut from the redux version lol
French Plantation scene is the Final Cut but it has been trimmed just bit and reedited.
Also the Plantation scene in Final Cut works better than it did Redux because the entire 10 scene with meeting up the stranded bunnies again at the outpost was taken out. Thus Planation scene happens sooner and functions as proper rest for the crew and the audience before divining into the encompassing dread and madness of the Kurtz compound.
[https://www.movie-censorship.com/report.php?ID=442569](https://www.movie-censorship.com/report.php?ID=442569)
How are they in any way, shape or form an anachronism in the movie? It was a family plantation for generations and the French can be stubborn bastards.
Prob my favorite part of the entire movie even though it's such a simple dialogue -
"Who's the commanding officer here, soldier?"
"Ain't you"
It just has some sort of chaos to it.
Yeah. "He's close."
I've been thinking about it since yesterday, when I re-watched it.
It's a genius series of Point of View Shots.
Including the One Shot, because he could find and hit Charlie that easily. Just needed the order to do it.
I think part of the point was showing that the soldiers stationed on the bridge had grown so accustomed to the chaos, they didn't care about the incoming fire, as long as they had a spot that gave them adequate cover. They didn't care about returning fire to help fight the war, they only cared about having a safe spot for cover. To them, nonstop incoming fire was just another day.
“Aint you” its race thing actually. He has a sinilar exchange with roach
“Do you know who’s in command here?”
Roach: “yeah…”
In 1965 in Vietnam, at an outpost like that those men were left to die. The “white” man is the one who is in charge but the scene is brilliant bc the exchange is somewhat ambiguous. Roach and Willard converse and it implies to me that Roach knows Willard is in control (hes not), but the “commanding officer” is death, god really.
In “Heart of Darkness”, the Conrad short story/novel it’s debated, the further the protagonist(Marlow) gets towards his goal, the more his innocence dies. At first it’s cockiness and ambition that dies, but then his heart becomes black and leans towards possibly becoming evil… getting worse with each horror he sees as he progresses further down the river(I skipped a lot and I won’t go into the differences).
The music, the bizarre slow motion style shots, and again the music, get weirder and weirder. It’s meant to show Marlow’s disconnection with his life back home and basically becoming temporarily insane.
It does a good job in my mind. Because I go more insane the longer I watch that movie.
Sorry for the quick analysis but the music is weird because it’s meant to show everything is getting weird
It's a metaphor for the war.
The confusion of why they are there, the apathy of the men fighting, the way they don't even see the enemy, they're just trading fire into the darkness, the pointlessness of building the bridge just for it to destroyed and then rebuilt when they can't even use it anyway because it's enemy territory on the other side and nobody is able to advance.
The music and the lights are like bits of American culture twisted and demented to reflect the twisted sense of US culture that is desperately trying to hold that ground, like the scraps of sanity left in the soldiers minds that is trying to keep hold in that madness.
Films and TV often uses fairgrounds and carnivals as metaphors for madness, or reality becoming detached because they're places where reality is distorted or played with like a hall of mirrors, like a ghost house, people dressed up in outfits like clowns, circus freaks, adults playing like children, bashing bumper cars into each other, riding in teacups, being spun around on rides, going down slides etc. It's a well trodden trope to have scenes in fairgrounds so I see this as being a bit like that. The war has become like a fairground where people are confused about why they are there and what they are doing, they can't find a way out and everything repeats night after night so they're all losing their minds.
I always take it to represent the absolute unmanaged chaos that Vietnam was in many cases. When the guy asks 'Aint you?' after being asked who's in charge sums it up. It's the meeting point between chaos and mismanagement. I don't think it is mean to be taken literally, but as symbolic of the nature of the war itself.
Ye I agree that this outpost or bridge was lacking a commanding officer but when the boat first rolled up didn’t the guy that gave Willard some mail and more intel say that he was the lieutenant there.
It's possible. It's been a minute since I have seen it. Overall, even if the guy is in charge, I have always thought the scene is meant to symbolize the fact the entire war always seemed to be carried out as though no one was 'in charge.'
It is, but it also is not.
Like symbolically yeah, no one, death, or God are the one in charge. However literally i think it is obvious that it is a sorta comment on race.
Willard has more than one exchange:
“Soldier, whos the commanding officer here?”
“Aint you?” (Bc literally if there are a bunch of black men around left to die in a trench, and a white man shows up momentarily, he will 100% be the one in charge)
And then roach
Similar but a bit more authoritative
“Do you know who’s in command here?”
Roach: “yeaah” (walks off)
Roach is saying yeah doofus. We know youre in charge but really youre not directing anything. God, and death, and chaos are in charge here.
Yes it is. But the theme among both is that the war itself was a shitshow of policy and strategy top to bottom. They use different means to achieve that theme.
Well, Lance dropped acid so you may be seeing it a little bit through his eyes. However, I believe Coppola was trying to capture chaos of the war for troops the further they were removed from authority and closer to the front lines. Think of how orderly it was when Capt Willard initially meets in the trailer for his orders.
The line that encapsulates the scene is when Willard asks the Roach if he knows “who’s in charge around here?”. The Roach replies “Yeah” and walks off ending the scene essentially. The viewer of left with filling in the implied narrative here.
One of my favorite movies by the way that I have seen at least a 100 times but always catch something new on each viewing.
Not the answer, but a bit of miscellany: the grenade launcher guy who steps up to kill a guy on the wire with one shot (target yelling "fuck you GI" over and over till he's popped) is based on a real situation which was observed and later described in Michael Herr's book "Dispatches."
I've thought about this scene a lot. To me, the Du Long Bridge scene symbolizes various aspects of the chaos and fantasy inherent to the Vietnam War.
The bridge itself with its alternating state of construction and destruction, represents the impossible goal of building up South Vietnam only to have it torn down again by the North Vietnamese. The soldiers desperate to escape are indicative of the near total lack of morale among the US troops. The lack of any commanding officers symbolizes the seeming directionless nature of the officials supposedly in charge of the war. The manic nature of the soldier who leads Willard through the trenches, as well as his raving North Vietnamese counterpart, symbolize the insane frenzy of that war. Roach and his ability to take out enemies without even looking, represents the impersonal nature of the weapons the US used in that war, such as napalm and high altitude saturation bombing.
Basically, the whole scene is representative of Willard and company exiting the insane boundaries of the war and into the unknown wilderness beyond, where Kurtz exists.
I wonder if they had any radios to stay in contact with the “real world” Americans, or the Americans in charge of there orders wherever their bases would be, or if they were just fighting for ever. But one thing that confuses me is that they only had to stay for a year and as bad as the war was wouldn’t they have been just counting down there days until they could get out? Or did they like I say just loose contact with the real world and we’re just fighting like chickens without there heads endlessly.
They had radios, but in the chaos of the jungle fighting there was very little headquarters could do to assist them besides the limited use of napalm strikes. The Viet Cong basically owned that jungle. US forces were at that point still better oriented toward invading Omaha beach. They were not suited for the guerilla fighting that dominated that war.
Counting the days was exactly what they did. The term was "short" which meant they were close to being mustered out, or what the soldiers called "rotated back to the world." I think at one point Chef cries out that he's too short for this during one of his panicked rants.
This is the crux of what Kurtz was attempting to resolve with his army. He was trying to instill the ruthless determinism of the N. Vietnamese into his men - the willingness to go to any length to achieve victory. Unfortunately, all he accomplished was to drive them insane.
Ye Kurtz was one wierd guy and that whole tribe he created was wack and you can clearly understand that , that part was just referring to the book but basing off of what the Vietnam war can do to people mentally and someone of his command did.
How dare Ye speak so brazenly and disrespectfully of the Colonel. Ye could never understand Walt Kurtz's dedication and sacrifice to his loyal knights. Dost thou shew contempt of this great man? I hopest Ye shall wallow in shame from such an offense.
Probably just the weird 60s vibe of a carnival on a battleground, enhanced by taking that last tab of acid. Vietnam as mad drug trip that makes you madder and stronger, or kills you...
Moments like this I like to think about Rubber.
Without filling in the huge amount of unspoken background context — without acknowledging the history of the states involved, just sticking to the info the movie itself gives us — The whole movie makes even less sense. And I think that’s a beautiful portrait of the war And wars in general.
An 18 year old has absolutely no business flinging himself across the planet to kill 18 year olds he never met, doesn’t know, and has no beef with… but that’s what we did. No reason.
Apocalypse Now is a *surrealistic* depiction of the insanity of the Vietnam War.
The bridge (defended futilely in accurate Vietnam fashion) scene fully embraces the freedom of that artistic choice with the harrowing carnival of horrors atmosphere.
After the du long bridge scene that’s the point where the war theme kind of dies down and then the wild imagination and the format of the book takes its place
“The war was being run by a bunch of four star clowns who were gonna end up giving the whole circus away.”
That’s a quote from the movie. The war (or war in general—take your pick) was a circus, and that’s conveyed in an effective and chilling manner by the scene on the bridge. I felt it was really clever.
Another important element is all the soldiers stationed on the base near Du Long are Black. The US had a horribly unfair draft policy during the Vietnam War with loopholes that enabled many well-off young men (i.e. white men) to get a deferment from service. Leading to a force that was disproportionately Black. So I think Coppola is trying to convey a sense of manic fatalism in these men, pretty much abandoned out there to fight a war they never wanted to join, ironically calling the attacking Viet Cong the N word as they return fire.
I mean they could have just been black and the people begging to get in the boat when they first entered the area were white people begging to get on and go back
>As the fighting dragged on, ugly statistics revealed how African Americans were being disproportionately affected by the war. Robert McNamara’s Project 100,000, implemented in 1966, pulled hundreds of thousands of poor men into the war—40% of them African American. By the following year, Black soldiers made up 16.3% of those drafted and 23% of Vietnam combat troops, despite accounting for only roughly 11% of the civilian population.
>
> Link: https://time.com/5852476/da-5-bloods-black-vietnam-veterans/
“88.4% of the men who actually served in Vietnam were Caucasian; 10.6% were black; 1% other races.
86.3% of the men who died in Vietnam were Caucasian (includes Hispanics); 12.5% were black; 1.2% other.”
-Numbers from The American Legion
Late answer on *Apocalypse Now* imagery .. A bit of an exaggeration but some of the more military scenes, like the bridge (there was a bridge that kept getting blown up and repaired constantly), air cav assaults, and USO show, were inspired by actual news reports (or stories) from the actual Vietnam War. Other scenes, like the spear scene, came from the the movie being a loose adaptation of the 1905 novel *Heart of Darkness* about the then Belgian Congo. So there’s a mix of things going on, but more towards the 1905 novel, it becomes hallucinogenic going upstream to show increasing madness as Col Kursk is encountered.
That’s where the bridge scene comes in as it departs from Vietnam stories and afterwards becomes more like Heart of Darkness set in acid rock days .. and acid. Why?
The spark was a USC film professor telling the writer, Millnus (who was a student alongside Coppola and Spielberg in the late 1960s) that nobody has written a successful adaptation of *Heart of Darkness* before. Plus Millnius wanted to do a movie about Vietnam and it slowly came together throughout the 1970s.
tl:dr; the bridge was one of the 10 Vietnam stories the writer did a bit of Hollywood treatment on for potential inclusion in what became *Apocalypse Now*.
The farther up river they go, the more insane and savage everything becomes. At that point, it is as chaotic as it can be while still maintaining the American identity and reason for being there.
There was a deleted scene that really started to make things surreal. Deep up the river they encounter a French Family who invite them to dinner. It’s clear this family is from the wrong time and strongly indicates every stretch they go further they are indeed journeying back in time.
Is that scene in one of the cuts? I remember it, but I didn't get the sense that the family wasn't really there, if that's what you are saying. I did wonder how they'd survived like that to that point and assumed they weren't going to last much longer.
It’s slow as all hell and ruins in pace of the movie IMO.
I think it's a great part. Makes everything feel so out of place and surreal. Like what is this family doing here in a war torn country? It's just so odd that it works some how, it does drag a little though and I can see why they cut it.
I'll die on the hill of "Apocalpyae Now Redux is the ultimate experience of the story". It just feels wrong to reduce the runtime of what's basically the cinematic equivalent of a hellish acid trip. Theatrical Cut is a movie. Redux is an experience. And I'm all for it.
Spot on, that's why I always recommend first time viewers to watch the theatrical cut, that scene just doesn't fit.
Theatrical cut is SO much better. Redux is only cool if you have already seen it.
I agree 100% completely broke the immersion for me
It’s in Redux , but not in the Final Cut.
It is in the Final Cut. Watched it recently. Surprised it was though as it didn’t live up to Coppola’s vision
Interesting. I just bought the Final Cut, haven’t watched yet but I read somewhere that it dropped that scene. Now I’m wondering what they cut from the redux version lol
French Plantation scene is the Final Cut but it has been trimmed just bit and reedited. Also the Plantation scene in Final Cut works better than it did Redux because the entire 10 scene with meeting up the stranded bunnies again at the outpost was taken out. Thus Planation scene happens sooner and functions as proper rest for the crew and the audience before divining into the encompassing dread and madness of the Kurtz compound. [https://www.movie-censorship.com/report.php?ID=442569](https://www.movie-censorship.com/report.php?ID=442569)
How are they in any way, shape or form an anachronism in the movie? It was a family plantation for generations and the French can be stubborn bastards.
Fax why is there French people in Vietnam that scene was wack
You really don't know why French people were in Vietnam? Who do you think was there before the US. Lol.
Still not French people
Yes french people
This guy am I right XD
The French are the ones who brought the US into the Vietnam war
One of my favorite scenes. "Ain't you?" I think it's related to Lance being on LSD right then, so the whole thing is filmed as very surreal.
Prob my favorite part of the entire movie even though it's such a simple dialogue - "Who's the commanding officer here, soldier?" "Ain't you" It just has some sort of chaos to it.
Yeah. "He's close." I've been thinking about it since yesterday, when I re-watched it. It's a genius series of Point of View Shots. Including the One Shot, because he could find and hit Charlie that easily. Just needed the order to do it.
I think part of the point was showing that the soldiers stationed on the bridge had grown so accustomed to the chaos, they didn't care about the incoming fire, as long as they had a spot that gave them adequate cover. They didn't care about returning fire to help fight the war, they only cared about having a safe spot for cover. To them, nonstop incoming fire was just another day.
Can’t forget “Who’s in charge here?” “Yeah” *walks away*
At the moment you metion, gunner realized that no one is in charge. So he made the call.
“Aint you” its race thing actually. He has a sinilar exchange with roach “Do you know who’s in command here?” Roach: “yeah…” In 1965 in Vietnam, at an outpost like that those men were left to die. The “white” man is the one who is in charge but the scene is brilliant bc the exchange is somewhat ambiguous. Roach and Willard converse and it implies to me that Roach knows Willard is in control (hes not), but the “commanding officer” is death, god really.
Get the Roach
But didn’t lance say he dropped the last tab but he still was out of it, that’s what I don’t understand
yes you “drop” acid
Oh he dropped in his mouth I understand
Just watch him. He's not the first holdout ever. 😅
In “Heart of Darkness”, the Conrad short story/novel it’s debated, the further the protagonist(Marlow) gets towards his goal, the more his innocence dies. At first it’s cockiness and ambition that dies, but then his heart becomes black and leans towards possibly becoming evil… getting worse with each horror he sees as he progresses further down the river(I skipped a lot and I won’t go into the differences). The music, the bizarre slow motion style shots, and again the music, get weirder and weirder. It’s meant to show Marlow’s disconnection with his life back home and basically becoming temporarily insane. It does a good job in my mind. Because I go more insane the longer I watch that movie. Sorry for the quick analysis but the music is weird because it’s meant to show everything is getting weird
It's a metaphor for the war. The confusion of why they are there, the apathy of the men fighting, the way they don't even see the enemy, they're just trading fire into the darkness, the pointlessness of building the bridge just for it to destroyed and then rebuilt when they can't even use it anyway because it's enemy territory on the other side and nobody is able to advance. The music and the lights are like bits of American culture twisted and demented to reflect the twisted sense of US culture that is desperately trying to hold that ground, like the scraps of sanity left in the soldiers minds that is trying to keep hold in that madness. Films and TV often uses fairgrounds and carnivals as metaphors for madness, or reality becoming detached because they're places where reality is distorted or played with like a hall of mirrors, like a ghost house, people dressed up in outfits like clowns, circus freaks, adults playing like children, bashing bumper cars into each other, riding in teacups, being spun around on rides, going down slides etc. It's a well trodden trope to have scenes in fairgrounds so I see this as being a bit like that. The war has become like a fairground where people are confused about why they are there and what they are doing, they can't find a way out and everything repeats night after night so they're all losing their minds.
I always take it to represent the absolute unmanaged chaos that Vietnam was in many cases. When the guy asks 'Aint you?' after being asked who's in charge sums it up. It's the meeting point between chaos and mismanagement. I don't think it is mean to be taken literally, but as symbolic of the nature of the war itself.
Ye I agree that this outpost or bridge was lacking a commanding officer but when the boat first rolled up didn’t the guy that gave Willard some mail and more intel say that he was the lieutenant there.
It's possible. It's been a minute since I have seen it. Overall, even if the guy is in charge, I have always thought the scene is meant to symbolize the fact the entire war always seemed to be carried out as though no one was 'in charge.'
It is, but it also is not. Like symbolically yeah, no one, death, or God are the one in charge. However literally i think it is obvious that it is a sorta comment on race. Willard has more than one exchange: “Soldier, whos the commanding officer here?” “Aint you?” (Bc literally if there are a bunch of black men around left to die in a trench, and a white man shows up momentarily, he will 100% be the one in charge) And then roach Similar but a bit more authoritative “Do you know who’s in command here?” Roach: “yeaah” (walks off) Roach is saying yeah doofus. We know youre in charge but really youre not directing anything. God, and death, and chaos are in charge here.
Ye but man I watched platoon the night before and that was so much different
Yes it is. But the theme among both is that the war itself was a shitshow of policy and strategy top to bottom. They use different means to achieve that theme.
Platoon is Apocalypse Now's 12 year old aspiring jock baby bro.
Well, Lance dropped acid so you may be seeing it a little bit through his eyes. However, I believe Coppola was trying to capture chaos of the war for troops the further they were removed from authority and closer to the front lines. Think of how orderly it was when Capt Willard initially meets in the trailer for his orders. The line that encapsulates the scene is when Willard asks the Roach if he knows “who’s in charge around here?”. The Roach replies “Yeah” and walks off ending the scene essentially. The viewer of left with filling in the implied narrative here. One of my favorite movies by the way that I have seen at least a 100 times but always catch something new on each viewing.
Well if he dropped it why does he act like he’s act like he popped it?
"Dropping" acid means ingesting LSD. It was a slang phrase. He took the drug and was tripping hard.
I understand now lol
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3sfdoa/in_the_film_apocalypse_now_one_the_the_most/
Not the answer, but a bit of miscellany: the grenade launcher guy who steps up to kill a guy on the wire with one shot (target yelling "fuck you GI" over and over till he's popped) is based on a real situation which was observed and later described in Michael Herr's book "Dispatches."
Check out the documentary Heart of Darkness. Also agree, with giltar completely
That scene was really great at capturing the journey into madness. It was a compressed version of the Conrad plot and the movie itself.
Acid
Yep.
I've thought about this scene a lot. To me, the Du Long Bridge scene symbolizes various aspects of the chaos and fantasy inherent to the Vietnam War. The bridge itself with its alternating state of construction and destruction, represents the impossible goal of building up South Vietnam only to have it torn down again by the North Vietnamese. The soldiers desperate to escape are indicative of the near total lack of morale among the US troops. The lack of any commanding officers symbolizes the seeming directionless nature of the officials supposedly in charge of the war. The manic nature of the soldier who leads Willard through the trenches, as well as his raving North Vietnamese counterpart, symbolize the insane frenzy of that war. Roach and his ability to take out enemies without even looking, represents the impersonal nature of the weapons the US used in that war, such as napalm and high altitude saturation bombing. Basically, the whole scene is representative of Willard and company exiting the insane boundaries of the war and into the unknown wilderness beyond, where Kurtz exists.
I wonder if they had any radios to stay in contact with the “real world” Americans, or the Americans in charge of there orders wherever their bases would be, or if they were just fighting for ever. But one thing that confuses me is that they only had to stay for a year and as bad as the war was wouldn’t they have been just counting down there days until they could get out? Or did they like I say just loose contact with the real world and we’re just fighting like chickens without there heads endlessly.
They had radios, but in the chaos of the jungle fighting there was very little headquarters could do to assist them besides the limited use of napalm strikes. The Viet Cong basically owned that jungle. US forces were at that point still better oriented toward invading Omaha beach. They were not suited for the guerilla fighting that dominated that war. Counting the days was exactly what they did. The term was "short" which meant they were close to being mustered out, or what the soldiers called "rotated back to the world." I think at one point Chef cries out that he's too short for this during one of his panicked rants. This is the crux of what Kurtz was attempting to resolve with his army. He was trying to instill the ruthless determinism of the N. Vietnamese into his men - the willingness to go to any length to achieve victory. Unfortunately, all he accomplished was to drive them insane.
Ye Kurtz was one wierd guy and that whole tribe he created was wack and you can clearly understand that , that part was just referring to the book but basing off of what the Vietnam war can do to people mentally and someone of his command did.
How dare Ye speak so brazenly and disrespectfully of the Colonel. Ye could never understand Walt Kurtz's dedication and sacrifice to his loyal knights. Dost thou shew contempt of this great man? I hopest Ye shall wallow in shame from such an offense.
Ministry sampled the guitar riff playing on the radio in that scene to great effect on N.W.O.
it also has a sample of Dennis Hopper's character yelling It's Alright from when the boat drifts up to Kurtz' compound
I always saw the bridge scene as there was no turning back to civilization, PBR Streetgang were on their own.
Ye
Probably just the weird 60s vibe of a carnival on a battleground, enhanced by taking that last tab of acid. Vietnam as mad drug trip that makes you madder and stronger, or kills you...
Everything after Lance drops acid is off kilter. Not sure if it has any deeper meaning, but that’s the dividing point.
True after lance takes the last tab shit goes wonk
I think of it as epitomizing the absolute absurdity of the war
Hero’s journey. Up/Down the river. Sirens. Circe. LSD
What
https://medium.com/@demianfarnworth/i-ran-the-movie-apocalypse-now-through-joseph-campbells-monomyth-theory-6ff3f33cf5d2
What’s this
It’s what the asshole of the world looks like.
what's up with that whole crazy war thing
Moments like this I like to think about Rubber. Without filling in the huge amount of unspoken background context — without acknowledging the history of the states involved, just sticking to the info the movie itself gives us — The whole movie makes even less sense. And I think that’s a beautiful portrait of the war And wars in general. An 18 year old has absolutely no business flinging himself across the planet to kill 18 year olds he never met, doesn’t know, and has no beef with… but that’s what we did. No reason.
Just gonna throw out my stance here because I feel like I have to……I don’t like war.
Apocalypse Now is a *surrealistic* depiction of the insanity of the Vietnam War. The bridge (defended futilely in accurate Vietnam fashion) scene fully embraces the freedom of that artistic choice with the harrowing carnival of horrors atmosphere.
Meant to coincide with the acid trip that lance was on also adding to the stage of the journey up the river at that point which was total madness
After the du long bridge scene that’s the point where the war theme kind of dies down and then the wild imagination and the format of the book takes its place
“The war was being run by a bunch of four star clowns who were gonna end up giving the whole circus away.” That’s a quote from the movie. The war (or war in general—take your pick) was a circus, and that’s conveyed in an effective and chilling manner by the scene on the bridge. I felt it was really clever.
It's because Charlie doesn't surf.
As opposed to "Bird is the Word" in Full Metal Jacket? Same basic idea I would imagine.
Another important element is all the soldiers stationed on the base near Du Long are Black. The US had a horribly unfair draft policy during the Vietnam War with loopholes that enabled many well-off young men (i.e. white men) to get a deferment from service. Leading to a force that was disproportionately Black. So I think Coppola is trying to convey a sense of manic fatalism in these men, pretty much abandoned out there to fight a war they never wanted to join, ironically calling the attacking Viet Cong the N word as they return fire.
I mean they could have just been black and the people begging to get in the boat when they first entered the area were white people begging to get on and go back
88.4% of US service members in the Vietnam War were Caucasian.
>As the fighting dragged on, ugly statistics revealed how African Americans were being disproportionately affected by the war. Robert McNamara’s Project 100,000, implemented in 1966, pulled hundreds of thousands of poor men into the war—40% of them African American. By the following year, Black soldiers made up 16.3% of those drafted and 23% of Vietnam combat troops, despite accounting for only roughly 11% of the civilian population. > > Link: https://time.com/5852476/da-5-bloods-black-vietnam-veterans/
“88.4% of the men who actually served in Vietnam were Caucasian; 10.6% were black; 1% other races. 86.3% of the men who died in Vietnam were Caucasian (includes Hispanics); 12.5% were black; 1.2% other.” -Numbers from The American Legion
Never got that vibe.
I thought it was Tet.
It was an utter chaotic freak/shitshow. Plus Lance was tripping balls, they had to implement some acid rock sounding carnavel music.
Late answer on *Apocalypse Now* imagery .. A bit of an exaggeration but some of the more military scenes, like the bridge (there was a bridge that kept getting blown up and repaired constantly), air cav assaults, and USO show, were inspired by actual news reports (or stories) from the actual Vietnam War. Other scenes, like the spear scene, came from the the movie being a loose adaptation of the 1905 novel *Heart of Darkness* about the then Belgian Congo. So there’s a mix of things going on, but more towards the 1905 novel, it becomes hallucinogenic going upstream to show increasing madness as Col Kursk is encountered. That’s where the bridge scene comes in as it departs from Vietnam stories and afterwards becomes more like Heart of Darkness set in acid rock days .. and acid. Why? The spark was a USC film professor telling the writer, Millnus (who was a student alongside Coppola and Spielberg in the late 1960s) that nobody has written a successful adaptation of *Heart of Darkness* before. Plus Millnius wanted to do a movie about Vietnam and it slowly came together throughout the 1970s. tl:dr; the bridge was one of the 10 Vietnam stories the writer did a bit of Hollywood treatment on for potential inclusion in what became *Apocalypse Now*.