Avis Metacritic

Fireball delivers the cosmic goods.

If it may be a return to familiar pleasures rather than an excursion into anything new, that’s hardly a problem when those familiar pleasures include Herzog dropping bon mots.

One of the most striking effects here occurs whenever Herzog and Oppenheimer slow down the film’s often-hectic pace to let viewers ponder the sheer beauty of the imagery, whether that’s painterly rendered details of landscape or the natural splendor of closely observed crystals and minerals.

If it’s strictly information that you want, that’s what the Discovery Channel is for. The pleasures of a Herzog doc are unique to him.

While the film as a whole is slightly haphazard, and the revelations are relatively few, there’s still a strong sense of engagement and excitement that illustrates better than most the thrill of discovery and the scope of what these humble rocks represent.

“Fireball” is a documentary about meteorites, but what makes it a Herzog film is that it’s in love with meteorites.

A bit more pragmatic, rambling, less lyrical, and not as laser-focused as Herzog's previous documentaries.

This film is charming and educational enough, but it’s not especially profound; it flirts with big ideas about the origins of life and the twin cycles of creation and destruction but doesn’t really let them sink in.

Fireball splinters into so many scattered pieces as it hurtles into our atmosphere that it almost seems as if the movie is trying to ignore any of the harder truths that might hold it together.

The humour doesn’t go nearly as deep as the science of “looking eternity in the eye,” resulting in a neat-enough educational experience, if not a fulfilling work of documentary cinema.