Herzog and Kinski's first collaboration was such a crazy, brutal, dark, desperate movie. Everything about this movie is written on Kinski's face. Everything is the tranquility before the killing. A Spanish expedition encountered difficulties in the virgin forests of the South American continent, and many members were swallowed by the roaring river. The morale of the expedition suffered heavy losses was low, and the leader decided to return the same way. Aguir, the deputy played by Kinsky, eager to complete the conquest of the South American continent with a arrogant attitude, eager to obtain the golden city that symbolizes power and status. So he became a rebel, he committed treason, and he led a few soldiers on the road of destruction to conquer the New World and establish a dynasty.
He ordered the shooting of the leader's subordinates, and achieved prestige by means of bloody violence. He accepted the new king in the expedition, but of course it was just a puppet. They sentenced the leader to hang on the spot, but the puppet king did not execute it out of conscience. He longed to spread his noble civilization and beliefs to the local Indians, he longed to be the greatest rebel, he longed to be God. As he said: If I fail, there will be people who will rule this continent in the future. They will greedily earn wealth and power. I spurn them, so I cannot fail. Under such arrogant, radical and powerful individual will, and under the group will with many difficulties and low morale, totalitarianism was born. They follow Aguirre in the practice of unrealistic delusions. Aguirre's team, which had few members, was assassinated by the local Indians with arrows. They could not eat salt for a month. They killed the puppet king who was eating and drinking under extreme starvation, and then executed the ex-leader's Hanging. They plunder the food of the local tribes but worry about their lives and the erosion of disease all the time. At this time, someone chose to betray. He didn't want to follow a lunatic to his life, but he was beheaded. Finally, after the last Native American assassination, Aguirre's daughter died. Then he said these words: I will marry my daughter and build a dynasty of the most noble and purest kind. . . . He had gone mad long ago, seeking self-worth and self-existence in unrealistic delusions. Herzog's films are always about extremes, extreme people doing extreme things. The arrogant attitude of modern civilization is reflected everywhere in the original scene, just like the Indian patriarch who threw the Bible to the ground was beaten to death. But in the end, the civilization was defeated by the primitive, and Aguirre still stood on the floating raft, surrounded by dead and sick soldiers. He paid the price for arrogance and madness, but he didn't seem to know it. The scariest story.
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