Adaptation?

As we've gotten further and further into Apocalypse Now I've begun to question whether it is truly an adaptation at all. Since the movie started I had a hard time distinguishing what parts of the movie related to Heart of Darkness and which were a reference to Vietnam. Part of doing an adaptation is being able to work with time period/setting, reoccurring images, characters, and speed amongst many other things. I happen to think that Coppola didn't think wisely when he decided to shoot Apocalypse Now in Vietnam. The movie portrays Vietnam does feel like this dark, fearful place that stems from war. I found that there were multiple times when I was cross referencing and thinking about history class. The Vietnamese weren't savages who lived in the jungle and needed to be civilized, they were indigenous people who were fighting for their independence. Apocalypse Now shouldn't have been about war, it should have been about an adventure gone wrong because war has too many different denotations to it. All in all, I did find one director's choice that I agreed with, and that was the use of lighting in the movie up until now. The lighting was most effective during the scene at the bridge when the soldiers were under fire. The way each blast lit up the sky and each soldier's face until it passed and went back to darkness, was great. The audience really got this feeling of desperation and chaos that surrounds war; that was pretty realistic.