- Aguirre, The Wrath of God is a film teeming with insanity from beginning to end and on both sides of the camera. My description will necessarily be much less interesting than the experience of watching it (a criterion for any good film I suppose), but here goes. The plot is straightforward enough, namely that a 16th century Spanish expedition journeys down the Amazon in search of the fabled city of El Dorado. While the group goes through several nominal leaders, the driving force behind this mad quest is always the domineering Don Lope Del Aguirre, played memorably by Klaus Kinski at his ugliest and most deranged. This mission may have been doomed from the start, but Aguirre impatiently speeds things along the path to ruin.
- In an early characteristic scene, one of the party's rafts becomes trapped in an eddy near a treacherous riverbank. Gunshots are heard overnight, and the group is seen dead on the raft the next morning. The arrows suggest the work of natives, but the circumstances of their deaths are in any case mysterious. Although the priest Carvajal (Del Negro) and the expedition leader Ursua (Ruy Guerra) seek to give them a Christian burial, Aguirre opts to have the raft blown apart by cannon fire rather than spend any more time on them. Of course, he never actually gives this order, but Aguirre's mere suggestions are typically interpreted as commands by those who want to go on living. Or rather, those who want to live a bit longer than everyone else.
- Kinski's portrayal of Aguirre is a miracle of casting that forever links the actor and character in our minds. Who but Kinski could power a raft down the Amazon with his sneer? In fact, the film sets up an interesting parallel between Aguirre's strength of will and the natural force of the Amazon. Each is wild, impersonal, strange, and utterly deadly, although it is clear in the end that the river wins out. Whether Aguirre descends into madness I suppose depends on whether he was ever sane, but his final speech is a memorable one. In one of the most striking scenes ever captured on film, Aguirre's last mad orders are howled to a crew of wild monkeys on a sinking raft as the strange and ethereal music of the jungle plays on undisturbed.
- Herzog seems to have an interesting fascination with people who live completely at odds with their environments. In Grizzly Man, he presents an eccentric idealist who believes (incorrectly) that he can safely live with bears. In Encounters at the End of the World, he shows us people who have gone out of their way to work at the South Pole. With Aguirre, we get a group of explorers who could not be more ill-prepared for their bizarre excursion. Horses, suits of armor, and sedan chairs may suit Castile, but they have absolutely no place on the Amazon river. Of course, one might also note that camera crews have no place on the river and that Herzog is not that dissimilar in this respect from the title character of his film. Still, the results of Herzog's own mad quests are a pleasure to experience, even if they must also have seemed doomed from the start.
- It was during this film that, rather famously, Herzog threatened Kinski with a gun. Although it seems now that no firearm was ever actually displayed, I think it says a lot about the director that the exaggerated rumor was so readily believed.
- The director's commentary is priceless. How many people did Kinski nearly kill during the filming of this movie?
