First Impressions cannot always be trusted – Apocalypse Now
Bob Peaks poster for the 1979 movie “Apolcalyse Now” is at once moving and thought provoking. At first glance it would seem to depict a serene view of nature. However upon closer inspection if you look clossely on the suns horizon those are not birds flying overhead to distand lands but the tin packaging of machines of war. Army helicopters are the machanicle birds ready to not fly peacefully above but ready to reak havoc in their path.
Inded the the seemingly serene landscape is not the regular colours of nature a person might hope to find whilst traveling or viewing a landscape painting. There are no lush green valleys or deep blue rivers. There are no rocky mountiains of stony greys and green moss. The lankscape here hints at the destruction about to enfold.
The sun seems to be a screaming hot ball. The landscape has in common only one colour. Red. The colour of blood. The colour that would soon be drenching the once green valleys and serenic hills in the distance when the apocalyspse was to unfold.
The rivers are not blue or green but a shade of red depicting the seemingly unnecesary war that the US deemed it neccesary to enter in the name of democracy. The movie depicts a small part of some of the happenings in Cambodia at the time of the Vietnam war as an agent is sent in on a secret mission to assadinate a renegade Green Beret.
The movie highlights the conflicting loyalties of war and those that are caught up in it. What seems to be at first glance a natural behaviour is not always the case in acutality. Just as the Green Berets find his loyalties changing in his new enviornment and is no longer who he appears to be so too this movie picture for the film “Apocalypse now” is not the peaceful scenic picture it appears to be upon first impression of it.
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