Interesting visual parallels between Waltz with Bashir and Apocalypse Now that show the surrealism of war. The first is Folman’s head emerging from the Mediterranean with the lights from Beruit lighting up his face. He appears transfixed as he as is drawn slowly towards the city and the massacre that is yet to happen. The second is the surfing scene. Ronnie Dayag and Frenkle lounging on a beach where soldiers are doing drugs and trying to avoid becoming friendly fire casualties.
There are other scenes where Waltz seems to have taken cues from Apocalypse. Little bits of surreal dialog pepper both movies. “How should I know? Look for a bright light. That’s usually where they dump bodies” is equal to the answer Capt. Willard gets when he asks a soldier who is in charge: “I thought you were Sir.”
In Waltz and Apocalypse nobody seems to be in charge. Ariel Sharon on his ranch and General Corman in his air-conditioned trailer in Vietnam are nominally in command and both could probably point to maps and intelligence reports to sum up the current military situation, but you get the impression that neither has any idea of what is going on with the rank and file. If they did then massacres and renegade Colonels wouldn’t happen. Or perhaps it is unavoidable. As Corman says when he orders Willard to find and terminate Kurtz: “…there’s a conflict in every human heart between the rational and the irrational, between good and evil. The good does not always triumph. Sometimes the dark side overcomes what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature.”