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MovieMail's Review
Werner Herzog's latest documentary takes him to the South Pole and turns his mind towards the end of mankind. Intrigued, MovieMail's Milo Wakelin follows from a safe distance...
Most filmmakers travel to the South Pole in search of penguins, but Werner Herzog makes it clear he is looking for encounters of a very different (and considerably less cuddly) variety. This brooding, dryly witty documentary follows the idiosyncratic director's visit to a remote Antarctic outpost, and offers a unique, starkly beautiful meditation on humanity's place in the universe.
Herzog's arrival in the McMurdo Research Station makes him one of the few directors to have filmed on all seven continents, but to his disappointment, he finds that it resembles a dilapidated Midwestern mining town complete with ATM, whipped ice cream dispenser, and – worst of all – yoga classes. Before he can make his escape into the wilderness, Herzog must first undergo a vigorous survival training program (which partly involves simulating a whiteout by wearing a white bucket over your head).
In the meantime, he encounters a motley collection of individuals who, seemingly unable to find their niche elsewhere, have drifted down to congregate around the South Pole. From the journeyman plumber who claims ancestry from the Aztec kings, to the woman whose party piece is to fold herself into a piece of luggage, to the solemn scientists and professional dreamers who staff the different research stations, Herzog's talking head interviews are characteristically funny, surreal and profound.
When he is finally allowed to escape the confines of McMurdo, Herzog is free to let his camera explore the strange beauty of the worlds that exists both above and below the ice surface. In The Wild Blue Yonder (2005) Herzog utilised underwater footage to depict a distant alien planet, and here it is used to similarly haunting effect, set to the strains of Mongolian chants and experimental compositions by Henry Kaiser, McMurdo's resident artist and research diver.
Although the film does touch on environmental issues, Encounters at the End of the World is not an Al Gore-style polemic. Herzog seems resigned to the fact that the human race is doomed to extinction. Will it be environmental catastrophe? Nuclear war? Or will the microscopic organisms that lurk beneath the ice return to terrify us on land?
For Herzog, the details are unimportant; he seems far more interested in how we meet our fate, not why. One answer comes from an unexpected quarter. Despite Herzog's best efforts, the penguins prove to be unavoidable. But Herzog's camera is soon drawn away from the colony to a lone bird who has set out on a determined, doomed march into the endless mountains of ice. For a brief moment we sense that Herzog – that bitter critic of sentimental anthropomorphism – has finaly found a soulmate.
Filmmaker Werner Herzog travels to Antarctica accompanied only by his cinematographer to explore the unique landscape and history of the world's most southerly continent, and to meet some of the people who live and work there including scientists of various disciplines. This is an outstanding film, accompanied by Herzog's inimitable narrative style. "The National Science Foundation invited me even though I made it clear I would not be making another movie about penguins," he says. A visually stunning exploration of the raw beauty of a land of fire, ice and corrosive solitude.
