Rating of
3.5/4
Bizarre but brilliant jungle film.
Indyfreak - wrote on 09/22/17
Visually breathtaking costume epic with one of cinema's great villains, the mad conquistador Don Lope de Aguirre, leading audiences on a surreal adventure into the Amazon as Aguirre feverishly searches for El Dorado.
Set against the emerald green backdrop of Peru, Aguirre leads a mad quest for riches into the dangerous jungles with a motley band of equally greedy explorers. Like APOCALYPSE NOW, the characters enter the jungle one way but leave it entirely transformed, or dead. The final sequence demonstrates how man's folly will lead to his downfall and then the forces of nature will take back what's theirs.
Director Wernor Herzog famously ventured into the South American jungle with only the cast and 8 fellow crewmembers to make this movie. No storyboards were used requiring many scenes to be made up on the spot. They spent five weeks enduring disease, animals, rapids, and bad weather to deliver a film no studio in their right mind would allow today.
It would be incomplete if not awful without lead actor Klaus Kinski, notorious for his own bouts of madness, as the dictatorial Aguirre.
