"I am the great traitor!"
So shouts Klaus Kinski's Aguirre (a play on the French word for "war"?) at one point in this beautiful but intensely disturbing film. The story is simple and familiar: European conquistadores rampage through the "New World" in search of glory, power, and wealth, and are eventually destroyed by the very world they seek to subdue.

In Herzog's hands, however, this familiar tale is told with all the poignancy it deserves. The mountains and jungles that surround the conquistadores create a sense of relentless isolation and loneliness--surely exactly what Joseph Conrad wanted to convey in "Heart of Darkness." The foolish pride of greedy men is expressed in the absurd conceit of making one of the band the emperor of the New World, and dressing him in a tattered purple blouse (he eventually dies of diarrhea, a fitting end). The barbarism of the conquistadores becomes fully revealed in the primeval jungle, where inhibitions drop away one by one. At one point, the band runs across the remains of a cannibal village, but it's clear that Herzog wants viewers to ask themselves who the real cannibals are. Toward film's end, everyone is dead save Aquirre, the evil genius of the band, and he's mad and doomed, captaining a tattered raft crawling with jungle monkeys and raving that he will marry his (dead) daughter and create a New World dynasty that will last forever. We, the viewers, of course know better. The forest will silently close over him, and it will be as if he never existed.

The interesting question raised by the film is just what Aguirre (and by implication, most of the rest of us) is a "great traitor" to. Most obviously the crown he vowed to serve, but more deeply to--what? Human dignity? Virtue? Ideals? Reason? God? This is the pat answer, but Herzog seems not to rest content with it. After all, the jungle closes in on the virtuous as well as the villainous, destroying each indiscriminately.

One of the best films ever made.

monkeys cannons no bears-oh my!
Poor dvd quality--there has to be a better edition out there (somehow I got a fullscreen copy, f**k!).
Cast and script--will challenge your patience if you are not already into Herzog and/or Kinski.
Personally found it disappointing, but more than watch-able. Herzog's obtusely insightful commentaries on his films alone are worth i t.

It's not a movie, it's an experience.
It's odd, almost amusing, to see the other guy try to describe this movie after having seen it only once. I must have seen it a dozen times, and I still have difficulty describing it.

This isn't one of those movies like Brazil or Nausicaa, where there's so much going on or the story's so sophisticated that you have to sit though it several times to take it all in. It's something else. Mersmerizing, hypnotic...brooding...awesome...

There's really no point in describing the plot or spoiling some surprises, it's more an experiential thing. If you can appreciate a good movie that's as long as it needs to be, this is required viewing. If you're more the "Dude, where's my car?" type, well...

Aguirre: A brilliant Herzog-Kinski collaboration.
"I, the Wrath of God, will marry my own daughter and with her I will found the purest dynasty the world has ever seen. We shall rule this entire continent. We shall endure. I am the Wrath of God!"--Aguirre.

Aguirre Wrath of God (1972) is arguably the best of the five film collaborations between German director Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski (Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Nosferatu: The Vampyre/Phantom Der Nacht, Woyzeck, Fitzcarraldo, and Cobra Verde). Herzog knew Kinski would be perfect for the title role of Aguirre, but the director and actor frequently clashed during production of the film. They argued about the proper portrayal of Aguirre. Whereas Kinski wanted to play a "wild, ranting madman," Herzog preferred something "quieter, more menacing." As a result, Kinski spent most of his time on location infuriated with Herzog, who reportedly even threatened to shoot Kinski during production. (Herzog met Kinski at the age of 12, when he and his family shared an apartment with Kinski's family in Munich-Schwabing. Herzog's documentary Kinski: My Best Fiend, chronicles their tumultuous relationship over the years.) Originating more in Herzog's imagination than in historical fact, Aguirre chronicles the doomed expedition of a brutally rebellious Spanish conquistadore, Lope de Aguirre (Kinski), down the Orinoco River through the Amazonian jungles of South America, in his obsessive quest for gold in the legendary city of El Dorado. Known for his versatile talent, volatile personality, and deranged antics, Kinski brought a perfect performance to the film as an insanely ruthless soldier, who terrorized his party of forty soldiers (clad in full armor) and native servants. The film's powerful, climactic ending depicts Aguirre hallucinating on a raft, alone with forty monkeys. Herzog shot the film on location in the Peruvian rainforest with a stolen 35mm camera, with a cast and crew from sixteen different countries. This film is absolutely stunning. See it.

G. Merritt

A stunning film, both as hypnotic descent into madness and as metaphor
A small group of nobles, several soldiers and slaves journey down the Amazon in search of El Dorado gold. When the journey appears doomed and the leader wants to return the men commit mutiny under the influence of Don Aguirre, who appears initially as a voice of reason and pragmatism but who becomes paranoid and delusional as the jungle and the river and the natives slowly but surely begin to decimate his crew.

At its most basic this is a story of a man's descent into madness, Herzog's variation on Conrad's vision of a heart of darkness that the so-called civilized man discovers as he enters the jungle and comes into contact with the so-called savage. Herzog's camera powerfully depicts an unrelenting and all-encompassing nature, the powerful and untamed river, the endless and overwhelming vegetation on its shore, a nature that overwhelms and even mocks the futile and in the end pitiful efforts of the Spaniards to maintain the trappings of dignity and ceremony. The pace of the story meanders like the river and captures the feeling of a slow descent, deep and inexorable, both dreamlike and intensely realistic.

At the same time, the film works as an unmistakeable -- even if blunt, it is certainly powerful -- metaphor that speaks to the ultimate absurdity of the pretensions to control and domination over nature and "the other" that characterize European and American history. In the end, Herzog seems to say, in spite of our humanistic ideals of mastery over nature and control over resources and conversion of all "outsiders" to "our" way of life, we are headed wrecklessly on a path of self-destruction and only nature will remain. (This is the basic story he has Brad Dourif tell in the engaging "Wild Blue Yonder," a picture of human beings who are in some ways admirable precisely in the naivety that leads them to pursue projects that are ultimately doomed to fail; and in Aguirre, the metaphor works to say that the project doomed to fail is the project of mastery and control over the globe). Whether or not you choose to read the film metaphorically, and whether or not you are impressed by the implicit views Herzog offers on the destiny of man, this is a remarkable and stunning and hypnotic and powerful film, that cannot fail to impress the lover of ambitious cinema that aims at revealing some kind of truth rather than merely to help pass the time as an escape from the mundane.

(Unfortunately, the dvd release is less than stellar. My copy has a few little glitches and artifacts here and there that don't dull the power of this film but make clear that this version leaves something to be desired. The sound also seems a bit muted. This film, and the rest of Herzog's corpus, deserves a Criterion treatment -- as is evident if you compare the dvd of Fitzcarraldo that Anchor Bay put out along with this one to Criterion's edition of Burden of Dreams -- the documentary of the making of Fitzcarraldo.)