APOCALYPSE NOW 7
his high- powered rifle on rooftops in Iraq and asked him to shoot women and
children. They’re the real villains in this movie, but the controversy has mostly
been over just how much of a ‘hero’ Chris Kyle really was.”
Reel History Versus Real History
American Sniper depicts Chris Kyle joining the SEALs after watching TV news cov-
erage of the U.S. embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi,
Kenya, on 7 August 1998. In point of fact, these events had nothing to do with
Kyle’s enlistment in 1999. The film also shows the United States invading Iraq right
after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, implying causality between the two events; in real-
ity Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 (most of the hijackers were Saudis). There
was a sniper known as Mustafa but Kyle never encountered him. The dueling snip-
ers motif was a script ele ment added by Steven Spielberg that was prob ably copied
from or inspired by Jean- Jacques Annaud’s Enemy at the Gates (2001). The ter-
rorist depicted as The Butcher might be loosely based on Ismail Hafidh al- Lami,
known as Abu Deraa (“ Father of the Shield”), blamed for thousands of Iraqi deaths.
Although the film alters Kyle’s book in significant ways, Chris Kyle’s own veracity
has proven to be highly suspect. In 2014 Jesse Ventura sued Kyle’s estate for defama-
tion and was paid $1.84 million in damages. In TV interviews in 2012 Kyle stated
that he assaulted Ventura in a bar in 2006 after Ventura made negative comments
about the Navy SEALs and their role in Iraq. Ventura has vehemently denied ever
meeting Kyle. Kyle also told a writer that he had gunned down two carjackers in
Dallas in January 2010 but there is no police rec ord of this crime. Kyle also stated
that he and a fellow sniper went to the top of the Superdome in New Orleans after
Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and shot some 30 civilians he thought were looting or
other wise making trou ble— another story that proved to be entirely apocryphal.
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Synopsis
Apocalypse Now is an American Vietnam War epic directed and produced by Fran-
cis Ford Coppola and co- written by Coppola and John Milius, with voice- over
narration written by Vietnam veteran, Michael Herr. Starring Marlon Brando, Mar-
tin Sheen, Robert Duvall, Frederic Forrest, Albert Hall, Sam Bottoms, Larry Fish-
burne, and Dennis Hopper, the film transposes Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of
Darkness (1899) to the Vietnam War as it follows Capt. Benjamin L. Willard (Sheen)
on a secret mission to assassinate Col. Kurtz (Brando), a renegade American offi-
cer who has presumably gone insane and formed his own guerilla army.
Background
Filmmaker John Milius tried to volunteer for military ser vice during the Vietnam
War but was rejected because of an asthmatic condition. While he was working as
an assistant for Francis Ford Coppola on The Rain People (1969), Milius began to
write a script that transposed Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to the Vietnam