"Hooray" For Hollywood: Assignment 17 - Evan Hays

I love movies. I feel like I should say this before I'm labeled as pretentious and not just very passionate. I like films for the same reason that I'll be writing about two of my favorite films in comparison to one another and why my favorite director is Stanley Kubrick. Film, for me, is the newest legitimate form of art, and when done in a proper way it can evoke emotions in the human psyche that to an extent can only be revealed through a module like film. Art gives us image, writing gives us moral, film combines both. Today I will be talking about two films that are spiritually related for me, "Apocalypse Now" and "Beasts of No Nation".

Apocalypse Now is an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" adapted for Vietnam. It follows a Special Forces captain, disollusioned by the ideals and lies behind war, as he travels upstream to find and kill Colonel Kurtz, an AWOL Green Beret colonel who has taken the war into his own hands. Beast Of No Nation is set in the same place as Conrad's novel ironically, in the Heart of Africa. This film tells the story of Agu, a small boy who loses his family in a civil war and is brought under the indoctrination of one of the rebel factions. He quickly becomes a child soldier and loses all of his childhood and most of his humanity.

Both of these movies are amazing pieces of work by their respective directors, complete with very similar shots (watch the scene from Do Lung Bridge and the drug addled assault on a small town in which Agu takes cocaine). Each film uses narration from the main character for two major purposes, first to invest us in that character, secondly to pull us away from the other characters and dehumanize us to an extent. The combination of shots from a non-human perspective and this narration helps compel us to the theme of each film. Captain Willerd in Apocalypse Now realizes only after Kurtz dies that every shred of human civilization, when stripped away, leaves behind only war and savagery. Agu completes his journey by being rescued by the UN peacekeeping forces, but is unable to fraternize with the other kids in the camp because he knows the brutality that exists within humanity behind the facade of society.

The films are art in motion, and these two are masterworks.