Heart of Darkness (1994)
Directed by Nicolas Roeg
A trading company manager travels up an African river to find a missing outpost head and discovers the depth of evil in humanity's soul.
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What critics compared Heart of Darkness to
The search riffs on the “Heart of Darkness” dynamic of Joseph Conrad, with Roy’s search for a father he has mirrored his career on.
I can think of any number of sci-fi films Ad Astra seems to be paying homage to, but it’s also clear Gray looked to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a model for the plot.
Gray and his fellow scribe, Fringe' s Ethan Gross, are clearly aiming for ( The Tree of Life 's Terrence) Malick-meets-Kubrick ( 2001 's Stanley) by way of Joseph Conrad ( Heart of Darkness , the book that inspired Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now ).
The “Heart of Darkness” template is, of course, anyone’s to draw upon, but what made Francis Ford Coppola’s film great is that he used Joseph Conrad’s classic as a frame on which to hang his psychedelic-slaughter vision of contemporary combat.
In this sense, Clifford is more like Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness , transposed so brilliantly to Vietnam by Francis Ford Coppola in Apocalypse Now!
And, too, it’s a corker of an action/monster movie: part RKO serial (natch); part square-jawed, testosterone infused manly romp; and part classic journey into the unknown that recalls and references, surprisingly and splendidly, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness – "Mistah Kong – he dead."
The dialogue is the weakest element and secondary characters, such the young crewman (Jamie Bell) who lifts a copy of "Heart of Darkness" from the New York Public Library, don't add much.
While at sea we meet the grizzled captain of the ship (Thomas Kretschmann); Hayes (Evan Parke), the African-American first mate; Jimmy (Jaime Bell), a castaway who is reading Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness; and Bruce Baxter (Kyle Chandler), the dashing and egocentric leading man.
New Zealander Peter Jackson of the Lord of the Rings trilogy fame, obviously thinks otherwise and forges ahead with this $200 million budgeted splashy eye-popping special effects extravaganza that mixes schlock and art (shamelessly alluding many times to Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," when the two sea stories couldn't be farther apart), and a hokey love story between a young woman so desperate for protection in the cruel world that she falls for a 50-foot gorilla.
Young Jimmy (Jamie Bell) is reading Joseph Conrad’s journey-into-madness classic “Heart of Darkness” and discusses it with father figure Hayes (Evan Parke) as they unwittingly enter into their own horrific adventure.
For while Chris Kennedy's formidable production design places us in an uncomfortably real space, absent McCarthy's haunting language, "The Road" for the most part is not so good at transcendence, at making us feel, as the book definitely does, that there is reason for us to endure its pitiless descriptions of what Joseph Conrad described in "Heart of Darkness" as "the horror, the horror."
Its strengths aren’t narrative or intellectual so much as emotional, what it makes us feel, the visceral simplicity of great myth like Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.”