10 Movies That Completely Reinvent The Books They’re Based On

Francis Ford Coppola’s iconic three-and-a-half-hour Vietnam war epic Apocalypse Now is based on a nineteenth-century novella, Heart of Darkness, that is barely ninety-five pages long. Though the film shares novelist Joseph Conrad’s themes of colonial exploitation and violence – and one or two classic lines of dialogue – the story, whilst recognisable, is different in almost every other respect.

Heart of Darkness is a simple story. A sailor called Marlowe travels along the Congo river in search of an ivory trader who has established his own private trade empire inside the Belgian colony of the Congo. The mysterious Mr Kurtz has taken the principle of colonial occupation to a murderous and insane extreme, and he must be stopped. When Marlowe finally finds him, he is a shadow of a man, obsessed with exterminating the 'brutes'. Kurtz dies in the jungle, whispering his final words: the horror, the horror.

Coppola changes the story freely, moving the action from the nineteenth-century Belgian colony to the twentieth-century war in Vietnam, adding characters, changing details, expanding the story significantly. In doing so, he makes a powerful political statement about the relationship between the catastrophic exploitation practised by the old European Empires and the American bombardment of Vietnam.

There's also a monster movie connection: both of the most recent screen adaptations of King Kong, Peter Jackson's version from 2005 and Legendary's 2017 Kong: Skull Island, feature not-so-subtle nods to Heart of Darkness. Make of that what you will.