While being sent by his superior, Francisco Pizarro, on a mission to penetrate the Peruvian highlands, Aguirre decides to break away from the Spanish crown and descend from the Andes into the Amazonian lowland rainforest in order to conquer a New World Empire of his own. Seven years before Francis Ford Coppola`s "Apocalypse Now", Herzog`s film delivers a new variation on the theme first explored by Joseph Conrad in his novel "Heart of Darkness"...