Apocalypse Now - Opening scene

 In Apocalypse now the opening scene tends to focus Captain Willard's thoughts, it does this by cutting scenes frequently to show that Captain Willard is thinking, also you can see many camera shots during the scene fading away, one prime example would be the helicopter flying, as the helicopter flies away or fades away you can hear the helicopter sound also fading away and sort of like shifting into the ceiling fan inside Captain Willard's hotel room.

During the dialogue it is pretty straight forward that Captain Willard wants to go on a mission, as he says that he's been waiting a long time and wants to be set in a mission because he is "getting weaker", during this scene he has a sort of like breakdown as he kind of goes crazy, he punches the mirror and overall his gestures show bad mental health, also we can see that he smokes a lot which shows signals of stress, perhaps stressing over not having any mission.

In one part of the scene where Captain Willard is punching a mirror, they use a wide camera shot to show the captain's entire body, showing how he's obviously freaking out and it also emphasises how he's alone since it's a wide shot and it's just him with nothing to do.

The transitioning between cuts varies, when the captain is speaking the cuts a prolonged and it takes longer for it to cut, however when the captain is in his thoughts the cuts are much shorter to show how he'd overthinking and if flowing with deep-thoughts as shown. 

The lighting begins very bright as the captain looks out the window and then you notice that it starts fading into low lighting, this shows how the captain starts getting indulged into his thoughts. At the start the captain's looking out the bright window and he starts thinking about war and the more he thinks about the more the clips cut and the lighting gets lower until the captain falls asleep.