2. Colonel Kurtz - Apocalypse Now
United Artists
The Line: "The horror...the horror."
How He Dies: Protagonist Captain Willard's (Martin Sheen) task throughout the entire movie has been to locate and kill (with extreme prejudice) the crazed Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who has gone rogue and is as such a huge embarrassment to the U.S. Army. After listening to Kurtz's philosophical outlook on war and human nature, Willard later returns to Kurtz's chamber and surprises him with a machete attack, easily outmatching and killing him. Kurtz lets out his final words and dies, words that have become so iconic that most of us are aware of them even if we've not seen or heard of Coppola's Vietnam war masterpiece. Hell, the phrase was even referenced by Chuckie in an episode of the Rugrats: that's how far its influence goes. What makes it so brilliant is its ambiguous meaning: what exactly was Kurtz referring to? Even the original novel's author, Joseph Conrad, was circumspect about divulging exactly what Kurtz meant, so viewers are free to interpret it as the horror of confronting one's own mortality, or perhaps simply the soul-eroding horror of war. Either way, its hauntingly poetic quality cannot be denied.