The main difference is in the physical location and its meaning
for the characters. Heart of Darkness is set in the Congo, during European
Colonization, and concerns the monetary desires of the trading companies and the affect that the
primitive, harsh jungle has on the people who enter it. Apocalypse Now is
set during the Vietnam War, and although the Vietnam Jungle has a similar effect on the people,
it is for different reasons; the Vietnam War destroys men through its brutality and the things
that men will do when given governmental carte blanche, not strictly through their own moral
deterioration as in the novel.
"Going up that river was like traveling back to the
earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were
kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy,
sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine."
(Conrad, Heart of
Darkness,
gutenberg.org)
The settings are
perhaps more similar than different; they are both jungles where seemingly civilized men become
brutal and evil, perhaps feeling that the locality removes the need to be moral, and that their
actions in this far-off land will have no consequences in the "real world." However, it is the
justification for action that differs: Kurtz in Heart of Darkness has been
affected by some unknown part of the jungle--something that Marlow feels he has just glimpsed the
edge of--and has lost himself in power and personal excess; in the film,
Apocalypse, Kurtz has been broken by the horrors of the Vietnam War, and
feels that his actions are as morally justified as any, since the seemingly-moral government that
sent him into the jungle has justified the war's atrocities.
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