To me the movie can never be a classic because of the
Absurd ending.
The type of Man Col. Kurtz was, he would never allowed himself to be killed without a fight.
I thought the ending of the film was such a betrayal of the character.
Absurd ending.
The type of Man Col. Kurtz was, he would never allowed himself to be killed without a fight.
I thought the ending of the film was such a betrayal of the character.
Kurtz wanted Willard to kill him. That's why he left him alive. Willard was at least the second assassin sent to him and Kurtz knew that one way or another he was going to die soon.
Kurtz wanted to find a man who could understand him and who would be credible when telling his story. That man was Willard.
That's just it.
Willard wasn't that Man because Sheen qho is a good actor didn't give a convincing enough potrayal.
Kurzt comes off as a giant of a Man literally and figuratively.
Willard comes off very weak.
Where Coppola failed was in the casting of Willard.
Again I like Sheen but he was the wrong man for the job.
After he fired Keitel he should have went with Nick Nolte
I think by the end Kurtz wanted to die. He was tired. His final words, "The horror. The horror," are the sum of his view of life, humanity, and the absurd morality of the Vietnam War. In an insane world, the sane man is the lunatic. Kurtz isn't the psycho we were led to believe, the truth is that we can't win against an enemy that is willing to go further, willing to cut the arms off their own children to spite us. He can't live knowing what he knows, but hopes to impart some vital message to Willard, to make Willard his voice. He succeeds. "They were going to make me a major for this and I wasn't even in their *beep* army anymore." Willard says. "Everybody wanted me to do it, him most of all. I felt like he was up there, waiting for me to take the pain away."
Kurtz death is a suicide assisted by Willard.
Kurtz is a great man of courage and moral clarity who was destroyed by the moral contradictions of an insane war. The Generals and those back home will only see him as a lunatic killer who abandoned his humanity for animal bloodlust. And that is why Willard leaves the jungle. He is the witness to Kurtz and his logical disgust with a system that doesn't see the irony of not allowinh the word *beep* to be written on a bomb that will kill people because it would be obscene.
I don’t think it was ever stated explicitly, but it’s implied that Kurtz was physically ill. The way he was lying on the bed when he first appears, the way he splashes water on his face and over his head, the way we hardly see him walking around all the place.
There was the line where Martin Sheen’s character says that Kurt “would rather go out like a man on his own 2 feet ... he was waiting for me to kill him” (my paraphrase).
Kurtz wanted to be killed at the end instead of dying on his bed. That’s why he let Martin Sheen loose from captivity.
Kurtz hated what he had become but at the same time he couldn't stop. He wanted to be stopped by another soldier who understood him.
share