Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
A few decades after the destruction of the Inca Empire, a Spanish expedition led by the infamous Aguirre leaves the mountains of Peru and goes down the Amazon River in search of the lost city of El Dorado. When great difficulties arise, Aguirre’s men start to wonder whether their quest will lead them to prosperity or certain death.
Aguirre is a singular, haunting work of cinema. Klaus Kinski's performance as the increasingly deranged Aguirre is one of cinema's great portrayals of megalomania — genuinely exceptional. Herzog's cinematography in the Amazon rainforest is breathtaking and primordial, capturing a world both beautiful and indifferent. The film is profoundly novel: its combination of documentary-like immediacy, mythic scale, and Herzog's obsessive production philosophy makes it utterly one-of-a-kind. The ending — Aguirre alone on his raft of monkeys, ranting into the void — is one of cinema's most iconic and devastatingly poetic conclusions. The plot is the one relative weakness: deliberately sparse and episodic, it serves the film's hypnotic mood more than it delivers conventional narrative momentum, which is a stylistic choice but limits its score in purely plot terms.