Here, White colonisers travel to South America in search of El Dorado only to find the moral abyss inside themselves. Their dark psyches are fully exposed to the camera's unwavering gaze: Their desire for unearned wealth, lack of ethical integrity, parasitism, superstition & self hatred. Theirs is a moral darkness excused in the name of bringing militarised Christian Light to the South American, so called, Savages they literally enslave. This behaviour is excused by the pragmatic realisation that political Church power can only come from military power and not from any spiritual force nor from any claimed genetic superiority.
This is an exceptional movie of ideas; in this case illustrating the folly of forcing your culture onto other peoples and of fighting nature, itself, in the process. That the colonisers feel the need to force themselves onto others proves a lack of substance in the very culture they seek to so aggressively espouse. As the empty souls here desperately look for meaning and self validation through destroying others they can then claim as weak and, by implication, then label themselves as strong.
The allegedly superior Whites here end up fighting among themselves as the incredible and lovingly filmed hardships of the journey through the jungle takes their inevitable toll. It is not the geography nor the people they fail to understand but their own mad motivation to become gods among men. They are the typical product of empty, outward looking empires; drifting upriver to face the eventual mercy of nature and natives.
The elliptical plotting style leaves much to the imagination – except the idea that to believe one is god is to become mad; stripping down this film to its very core. Like that other great work about greed for gold, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and the recent (2008) selling of sub prime mortgages in the United States, these men are destroyed by their own greed rather than enriched by it.
Joseph Conrad would have loved this brilliantly-acted movie.
Copyright © 2009 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.
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