If you are looking for answers as to why a red worm lives in the anus of static sea life or the consistency of the milk of a baby seal, you have come to the right place. The latest Werner Herzog documentary, dedicated to Roger Ebert, Encounters at the End of the World, is a study of man and his interaction with nature in the ice-laden rivers, mountains, and shores of Antarctica. Still searching for the bizarre and the eccentric, Herzog takes us as far south as it is possible to go where he meets and, interviews scientists, researchers, travelers, and a variety of oddball characters looking for meaning and purpose. Herzog's documentary is loosely constructed and overly long, freely mixing the sublime and the banal. Like some of his other works, it is filled with gorgeous cinematography, exquisite music, and Herzog's unique commentary spoken in a somber, musical voice that has a distinct poetic quality that strives for profundity.
Herzog was paid by the Discovery Channel and the National Science Foundation to travel to McMurdo Station in Antarctica to gain some insight into the mysteries of the land at the bottom of the world, promising only that he would not come up with another film about penguins. He criticizes McMurdo as an ugly mining town and rails against the noise and the tractors and yoga and aerobics, which he calls an "abomination". His study of course is less about the sex life of the penguins than about the oddball humans and why they have gone to great lengths to travel to the bottom of the earth. We meet a linguist who had studied the disappearance of native languages but is now growing hydroponic tomatoes in a tin hut, a traveler who went from Ecuador to Peru in a sewer pipe, a plumber who is convinced the shape of his hands points to a royal Aztec heritage, and a woman who contorts her body to fit into a gym bag. We see scientist huddled together watching the science fiction thriller "Them" from 1954 and probably films of other genres that even Herzog was not able to include.
We are also privy to a humorous training exercise as Herzog follows a survival class at McMurdo in which trainees put a white bucket over their heads to match the blindness they would encounter in a windstorm. Connected to each other, they search blindly for the trainer who is actually only fifty feet away, perhaps an inadvertent metaphor for humans trying to connect with God. Like all of Herzog's films, there is an upside and perhaps the main reason to see the movie are entrancing underwater ballet sequences of the divers who risk their life every time they plunge in to the freezing waters, shots of the beautiful caves carved in the South Pole, and satellite images of sea ice compressed into an animated montage. Throughout the film, Herzog finds the most beautiful music imaginable Mongolian chants included with original compositions by experimental composer-guitarist Henry Kaiser, who co-produced the film and provided the music with David Lindley.
All of this beauty strives for a spiritual context but comes up short. Sadly, little attention is paid to subjects such as global warming and how it may affect the future of the region and of mankind. The scientists he interviews are some of the top men in their field but most are convinced that the human race is doomed to extinction, a proposition not challenged by Herzog who is too busy excoriating yoga, penguin movies, aerobics, environmentalists (tree huggers and whale huggers) and asking such questions as whether or not penguins are gay or insane. Perhaps the most telling sequence is the one, most probably staged by Herzog, in which an individual penguin refuses to follow the group heading to open water, but instead opts for a lonely and sad journey to the mountains, likely to result in certain death. It tells more perhaps about Herzog than about penguins or the human condition.
Herzog was paid by the Discovery Channel and the National Science Foundation to travel to McMurdo Station in Antarctica to gain some insight into the mysteries of the land at the bottom of the world, promising only that he would not come up with another film about penguins. He criticizes McMurdo as an ugly mining town and rails against the noise and the tractors and yoga and aerobics, which he calls an "abomination". His study of course is less about the sex life of the penguins than about the oddball humans and why they have gone to great lengths to travel to the bottom of the earth. We meet a linguist who had studied the disappearance of native languages but is now growing hydroponic tomatoes in a tin hut, a traveler who went from Ecuador to Peru in a sewer pipe, a plumber who is convinced the shape of his hands points to a royal Aztec heritage, and a woman who contorts her body to fit into a gym bag. We see scientist huddled together watching the science fiction thriller "Them" from 1954 and probably films of other genres that even Herzog was not able to include.
We are also privy to a humorous training exercise as Herzog follows a survival class at McMurdo in which trainees put a white bucket over their heads to match the blindness they would encounter in a windstorm. Connected to each other, they search blindly for the trainer who is actually only fifty feet away, perhaps an inadvertent metaphor for humans trying to connect with God. Like all of Herzog's films, there is an upside and perhaps the main reason to see the movie are entrancing underwater ballet sequences of the divers who risk their life every time they plunge in to the freezing waters, shots of the beautiful caves carved in the South Pole, and satellite images of sea ice compressed into an animated montage. Throughout the film, Herzog finds the most beautiful music imaginable Mongolian chants included with original compositions by experimental composer-guitarist Henry Kaiser, who co-produced the film and provided the music with David Lindley.
All of this beauty strives for a spiritual context but comes up short. Sadly, little attention is paid to subjects such as global warming and how it may affect the future of the region and of mankind. The scientists he interviews are some of the top men in their field but most are convinced that the human race is doomed to extinction, a proposition not challenged by Herzog who is too busy excoriating yoga, penguin movies, aerobics, environmentalists (tree huggers and whale huggers) and asking such questions as whether or not penguins are gay or insane. Perhaps the most telling sequence is the one, most probably staged by Herzog, in which an individual penguin refuses to follow the group heading to open water, but instead opts for a lonely and sad journey to the mountains, likely to result in certain death. It tells more perhaps about Herzog than about penguins or the human condition.