“The horror... the horror...” - Colonel Kurtz are the last lines of Apocalypse Now, the war film masterpiece directed by Francis Ford Coppola , which really explores horror . Typical war films, such as Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket or Boulle's The Bridge on the River Kwai, follow the camaraderie of a protagonist and his unit and their struggles that build to a violent, climactic confrontation in which both sides suffer losses to illustrate the tragedy of war. . Apocalypse Now is different; there are only two moments of brief violence that the main character participates in, and he rarely speaks to anyone else. The real conflict of the film is in the viewer's mind and not on the screen. Apocalypse Now succeeds in its goal of drawing audiences' minds into the madness of war through hauntingly beautiful cinematography paired with an effective soundtrack to create a surreality and delayed editing to elicit a desire for violence. The opening sequence sets the stage for surreality and subjectivity. of the images and sounds of Apocalypse Now. Initially, helicopters fly over a palm beach in slow motion. The rotor blades beat too slowly to be those of a helicopter at real speed. The viewer can immediately distinguish this as indicative of a dreamlike perception because common expectations suggest that life flows at normal speed and therefore films about real life do the same. This gives the sequence a surreal feel. The smoke, stirred by the helicopters, spreads thinly; elegantly; pleasant. However, the coast soon explodes into mini mushroom clouds of napalm fire. Still in slow motion, it appears to the viewer both artistic and fascinating. A normal shocked reaction to destruction is suppressed in favor of amazement because the deluded film...... middle of paper ...... beautifully illustrates the sickening and senseless violence of war (since viewers certainly look inward and they discover an unjustified desire for violence) and how close to human nature that war is. Instead of showing a war and its brutal outcome to conclude with the clichéd “war is bad for everyone” moral, Apocalypse Now attempts (and succeeds) in taking the opposite perspective. It convinces the viewer that “war is a good thing” so that when they find themselves believing it, they find that it also contradicts their conventional notions and must examine why we actually fight. As soon as we stop intrinsically trusting our perceptions, with only a few hours of sights and sounds, Copolla first elicits the violent tendencies of his audience and then shows them an image of those horrors. The image is a mirror and the “horror” is within us.