Klaus Kinski, in the title role, does his wild-eyed Kinski routine, overshadowing in the process the rest of the cast who seem to be on a mission to demonstrate that acting's actually hard.
The editing is poor. The results of the complete post-production sound overdub range from the o.k. to the ridiculous.
All aspects of the camerawork are done really badly. As for choices of frames and camera movement, nothing in particular seemed to motivate the former except for the desire to show the person that's speaking most of the time and the latter makes you remember that it's not easy to hold a camera still when you have one leg in the river, the other on an uneven stone and nothing to stabilize the camera. The lighting and colours? Well, you can see everything alright.
The complete absence of a narrative arc, the lack of motivation for some scenes (during one I got the impression that the actor was wondering when it would be over so he could finally scratch his arse) and the quality of the dialogues might lead the naive observer to believe that they just made the story up as they went along, but no:
When people say that something's "so bad that it's good", they usually mean that a work of art is unintentionally funny, and indeed I had to laugh when I watched some of the death scenes, which seem like reenactments of something out of The Simpsons. But what kept me watching was the fascination with the yawning gap between the film's renown and the real thing. Incredible. (2)Herzog wrote the screenplay "in a frenzy", and completed it in only two and a half days. Much of the script was written during a 200-mile (320 km) bus trip with Herzog's football team. During the bus trip, his teammates got drunk after winning a game and one of them subsequently vomited on several pages of Herzog's manuscript, which he immediately tossed out the window. Herzog claims he can't remember what he wrote on these pages.[3]
The screenplay was shot as written, with some minor differences.
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