Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes [Aguirre: The Wrath of God]

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© A.J. Malouin 2008

(Rating: 1 by Al.)
(See our side-bar page “How Caryl & Al Rate Movies”)

(1972/West Germany/Peru/Mexico. Directed [and written] by Werner Herzog.)

“On Christmas day, 1560, we reached the last pass in the Andes…

…and for the first time looked down on the legendary jungle. In the morning, I read mass, then we descended through the clouds.”

Bad decision!

We know it’s bad because a title card has just tolt us that Carvajal’s journal — from which those voice-over words come — is the only damn thing to survive from this Pizarro-led adventure.

This is a visually stunning film!

The opening set piece, covered in angelic music, shows the Pizarro expedition snaking its way down vertical steps cut into the Andes Mountains.

We see aristocratic Spanish ladies carried in sedan chairs. We se calvary horses in full decorative regalia. We see soldiers in armor plate, and soldiers carrying canon down the mountain. We see Indian slaves chained together.

Herog’s cameras give us the full spectrum of Spanish civilization, cascading down the mountain from their civilized past, down into Nature’s steaming primordial jungle.

The cameras tell us that these people have no business being here. They are not dressed for it, for openers. Their progress is snail-like, for another. The steps they descend are perilous, treacherous, and slippery — and this is the last good time the expedition will have.

Herzog’s cameras and direction give us an eyeball-riveting account of full-tilt Spanish culture disappearing sling-by-arrow without a blip into the alien landscape of Nature’s mud-strewn jungle.

At the heart of this darkness is the brooding, maniacal revolutionary soldier Don Lope de Aguirre, played by a Klaus Kinski who absorbs the total screen. The evaporating Spanish pageantry, the increasing natural horror, and the deepening jungle goop surround his egotistical revolution as he plunges unwaveringly toward the river he hopes will lead him to the gold city of El Dorado.

Meanwhile, horses and riders become hopelessly entangled in Nature’s vines.

Soldiers struggle to keep cannon barrels dry as they slog through Nature’s continual knee-deep mud.

Then comes the first sight of Nature’s raging river!

“No man can survive this,” says a soldier. “We will,” replies another.

Welllllll, they don’t.

A splinter group is send off to find both food and friendly Indians. There is, however, little food for those used to eating in restaurants and not one friendly Indian inside Nature’s entire trackless greenery.

The splinter group builds rafts. The river rises 15 feet overnight, sweeping the rafts away. Aguirre takes over command of the group, imprisoning its leader, appointing a fat nobleman as the President of this new Spanish jungle, and ordering the building of more rafts.

Aguirre himself is a force of nature, but one who fails to realize how little power he has against the larger Nature. “If Aguirre wants the birds to fall dead from the trees, the birds will fall dead from the trees,” he says.

That’s Aguirre’s plan for Nature.

Nature does not buy into it.

Nature’s green treachery, Nature’s brown raging river, and Nature’s ubiquitous but unseen Indians decimate the splinter group. They pick it off one small tragedy after another.

Heat and lack of water start to zap the mental capacities of those who remains. Towards the end, the last raft floats slowly, just barely moving down the river. The last remaining horse goes mad on the raft and tries to kick it apart. Aguirre’s teen-age daughter dies slowly in his arms with an arrow buried in her belly. A hallucinating soldier believes he sees a ship with a white sail high in a treetop. We know he’s nuts, until we see it, also.

In the last set piece, Aguirre is left alone on the disintegrating raft, which is now beautifully overrun with Nature’s large herds of small monkeys. Aguirre still stands in a chest of useless plate armor, striding stem-to-stern on the carnage that is the last raft’s remains.

To no one there, Aguirre orates, “We will endure. I am the wrath of God. Who else is with me?” Beautifully and achingly, *no* one is with him.

There is only Nature’s slow-moving river, Nature’s unchanging sky, and Nature’s large herds of small monkeys.

(1 hr 33. Not rated in the USA. In German, with English subtitles in the USA. With Klaus Kinski as Don Lope de Aguirre; Helena Rojo as Inez; Del Negro as Brother Gaspar de Carvajal; Ruy Guerra as Don Pedro de Ursua; Peter Berling as Don Fernando de Guzman; Cecilia Rivera as Flores; Daniel Ades as Perucho (as Dan Ades); Edward Roland as Okello; Armando Polanah as Armando; Alejandro Repulles as Gonzalo Pizarro, and; Gerd Martienzen as the Voice of Don Lope de Aguirre [uncredited.])