Fitzcarraldo Rating: Release Date: 02 November, 1999 Retail Price: $34.98 OUR Price: $30.99 You SAVE: $3.99! Cast: Klaus Kinski Claudia Cardinale Werner Herzog

Fitzcarraldo Reviews

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Dreaming on an epic scale
Nearly a quarter of a century on, Fitzcarraldo is still very impressive stuff. One thing which makes the film stand out is its reality - not the plot, which takes a small incident from forgotten history and exaggerates it into a grandiose epic on the reality of dreams, but the fact that, with the exception of what appears to be one superior model shot in the rapids sequence, everything you see is done for real. A real ship dragged over a real mountain by real extras in a real location. In the cgi era, it's almost like watching a documentary, with Herzog literally becoming Fitzcarraldo as he acts out his dreams for real.

For all the fireworks between Kinski and Herzog, they bring the best out of each other: Kinski is every inch the obsessed dreamer and you really believe he HAS to bring opera to the jungle in a way that you simply can't imagine Jason Robards pulling off (Robards left the film after falling ill: from the brief extracts of his scenes with Mick Jagger, it was a blessing in disguise for the film). What's more, by the end of the movie, you really feel that Fitzcarraldo has [i]earned[/i] his small triumph, and the wondrous smiles on the faces of Kinski and Claudia Cardinale prove that cinema's greatest weapon is the human face. It's just a shame that Anchor Bay's DVD misses several key lines in the subtitles from the superior German version, which meant rewinding the DVD with the inferior English dub, a sad blemish on an otherwise excellent disc.


It lacks a real story.
No doubt, Werner Herzog is an incredible director and this movie can put many American films to shame, but what is lacking in this epic is a real story. The story is at times very confusing, and I think the only reason the film was made was to haul the ship over the mountain.

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