Encounters at the End of the World

I had a chance to see Werner Herzog's latest documentary at the Telluride Film Festival, where it received great buzz and very high praise upon its debut. Herzog informed the audience that he was shown some footage taken by a photographer in Antarctica while doing post-production on Grizzly Man and he was immediately entranced by what he saw. From this he was compelled to visit the continent and shoot some footage of his own, which became Encounters at the End of the World.

The film perfectly balances both gorgeous footage of the continent as well as fascinating interviews and anecdotes of the many researchers and workers of the McMurdo research station. There are many humorous moments, such as a scene in which visitors must go through a follow-the-leader type exercise before being allowed to venture out into the wild. Participants in the exercise must wear buckets adorned with ridiculous caricatures over their heads in order to simulate a whiteout. They must then try to follow each other as a group and find a researcher a distance away. Herzog simply observes as the participants fail over and over to find the researcher, which left the audience laughing for minutes on end. Another excellent scene has Herzog interviewing an expert on penguins, who goes into some of their more bizarre behavior, such when penguins go insane. In both cases, Herzog features striking footage and amusing interviews and narration.

The film fits in well with Herzog's already substantial canon. It is a beautiful look at a beautiful continent populated by a forklift driver with a PhD, a woman who once traveled to South America in a sewage pipe on the back of a truck, researchers who play electric guitars on top of research station to celebrate discovering three new species of aquatic life in one day, and many more. Their stories converge where all the lines on the map meet at the end of the world. Herzog shot the film with a crew of just himself and the camera operator, and the result is a film with some of the most beautiful footage I've ever seen. Do not miss this when it receives general release!

There is no denying the man. He has already changed me, and others.

Interestingly, it seems that this is less by design than by accidents that occur because he chooses to put his camera in places where the cosmos is unstable. Sometimes it rewards deeply, because we find our own window into beautiful chaos. Sometimes the experiments fail, and you can see how he has tried to distract us with observations from himself rather than the world he has placed us in.

This is such a failure. He goes, enticed by the promise of cruel, unfathomable beauty. He finds no accident with inherent narrative, so he inserts his own. Unfortunately, Herzog the man and mind is the least interesting element of any Herzog film. I know I am in the minority here, because he has a celebrity persona.

But watch this, and see how he interviews his subjects. He is trying to cast them as beautiful souls doomed be a part of the ugliness of humanity. Some of the interviews are staged or rehearsed. He admits this. I know the words are genuinely from the people who speak them, but the narrative is false. Herzog has this notion — this essentially Austrian notion — that nature is only full when it is cruel, stark and dangerous. Humanity is unnatural; only a few butterfly souls escape, and they are to be cherished.

So look here: we have his usual Wagnerian chorus, using internationally fused sounds. We have some nature, always presented as cosmically unfriendly. We have episodes that underscore the hopeless weakness of society. And we have characters that engage and inspire. But it all seems so desperately constructed here. Whether he likes it or not, he has simply made a penguin film, but with humans.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

Encounters at the End of the World is a quirky and interesting film, definitely a departure from your average dry science documentary or eye-candy nature film, though it has elements of both.

It focuses predominantly on the odd collection of people drawn to live in an Antarctic research station, and to a slightly lesser degree on the oddness of the region itself, and the bizarre bits of scientific trivia that can be found there. Then there the bonus meanderings about the ultimate doom of humanity and whether we originally emerged from the sea onto land to escape the "horror" of marine ecosystems.

Many of its parts are fascinating, but for me, it didn't quite come together as a whole. It drifted in a lot of different directions, but seemed overall to be lacking in focus a bit. There were also a couple of elements that disturbed me a little - one was the inconsistency of talking about how humanity is destroying itself one moment, and then bashing "tree huggers and whale huggers" the next. I guess it's OK to notice that we're damaging the world, but not to try and do something about it? The other was that in some cases he seemed to be going out of his way to depict the people he interviewed in embarrassing ways, with things like leaving the camera lingering on them after the interview appeared to be finished, as they stood nervously, apparently trying to figure out if it was over or not.

But on the whole I would recommend it -- the flaws are offset by some impressive visuals (especially the underwater footage), dry humour, interesting ideas to ponder, and a really great soundtrack by Henry Kaiser and David Lindley, which work very well with the oddness of the content.

The world ends at Antarctica, at least geographically - there's nothing further south - and quite possibly in a greater sense. Werner Herzog has gone there to make a film, catching the opportunity to capture some of it's beauty in a way rarely seen on film, and also to share some of his thoughts about nature and humanity. In and around the large McMurdo Research Station he circulates the various people working there, joins them on their fieldwork and interviews them, all resulting in a blend of beautiful images, personal micro-stories, funny sidetracks, well paced informative moments and an often fascinating look at nature's inexplicable mystery, humanity's as well as Mother Earth's.

This is a large canvas, perhaps slightly difficult to put in proper words. Above all, all of the ideas and thoughts within the movie stems largely from the viewer's own imagination, Herzog is merely - with his warm and serious, yet inexplicable witty, narration - planting the mental seeds and asking the questions, some rhetorical and some forever impossible to answer. And it is remarkable how he does this, how this film is designed. All throughout, Herzog moves about like a genuine tourist and at the beginning I am surprised how spontaneous the whole idea feels, almost as if I am actually watching a private home video made for personal remembrance. The only difference being of course, that it would be the kind of home video Herzog would make. And be that as it may, this is still a great movie, because it continues from this elementary first stage of how he travels to the station, combined with stock footage of the explorers of the 1800s, into that of a true thinker's exploration in a romantic setting. The form of the film gradually evolves, first small steps with the reality of the small, modern society that has been developed, the paradox of a restaurant with a beloved ice-cream machine (needless to point out further, and despised by Herzog), and with a scene of people having an unusual way of training, in case they would get lost in a blizzard. From then on, at least I was hooked and from these minor steps of humanity looking itself, if but slightly, in the mirror, the movie blossoms into a greater and greater abyss of questions that human beings will always feel the hunger to answer, questions they never will be able to answer but questions that human beings will always need to have.

Human beings, now there's another thing. Herzog encounters a lot of inhabitants of the station and gets to know them, and while not to say that there aren't interesting people throughout the movie, but here we have the adventurous woman who has her own party trick where she amuses people by becoming luggage. She has many stories to tell, like how she hitch-hiked from USA to Africa in a sewer pipe. Another man claims he once survived getting killed by the mayans . There are others with less dramatic things to say. Like one of the biologist divers, slightly sad since he's decided that at that very day he will perform his last dive. He feels like his job is done. Another man is simply showing how he has two fingers of the same length, which would prove that he's got Aztec blood in his veins. Or so they say.

You might understand what I'm getting at. In these very sequences of utter realism, we do get to feel the fresh air of a normal day out at the Antarctica. And it helps settle the notion that this is a film about humanity. We are constantly in the real world, with real people, in contrast to Grizzly Man (2005), Herzog's previous nature documentary, where we were indeed surrounded by breathtaking nature, but we were also viewing the Timothy Treadwell show, put on by the star persona of himself, if there ever were another. Here we meet the actual answer to Treadwell's love to nature. Science, philosophy, mere being in the never ending light over the ices. Herzog seems very much in love with nature, be it ice skies underneath the surface, or active, thundering volcanoes or just the remarkable penguin scene that could break your heart (even Herzog could not resist one of those sentimental scenes directed by nature, despite even claiming early on that this is "not a penguin film"). It may be penguins, but it's hauntingly beautiful nonetheless.

Throughout the movie, Herzog keeps expanding his view on nature and humanity until we reach the end, and the topic we've all been waiting for. The climate change. As you'd expect though Encounters at the End of the World is by no means a propaganda film, it would obviously be beneath Herzog's dignity. No, it seems like Herzog quietly accepts that mankind might be headed for doom - it's as natural as the deranged penguins leaving it's flock to never return - and instead asks what alien lifeforms might think of our remains if they would land to explore in thousands of years. Yes, the explorations goes on. And I think it is importance to remember that the end of the world is not the end of the world. Mother Earth will be alright. She has all the time in the universe. Makind however, we may be getting near the end. I can't help but feel, when I see the colossal, wide, arctic images and the spreading cancerstain of urbanism, that after all mankind has done, Mother Earth deserves to be left alone for a while. There has to be some peace and quiet in the Universe. If the aliens do land, and they do study our hideouts, and they do feel confused over finding a fish deep down in a tunnel in the Antarctica; I'd suggest they'd watch Encounters at the End of the World.

Encounters is an almost straight forward account of Werner Herzog going to Antarctica.Invited to go by one of the scientific organizations he agreed to go because he was fascinated by life under the sea ice (see his Wild Blue Yonder which used footage from under the ice to represent an alien world) and wanted to have a chance to film life there. He also warned them it would not result in film about fluffy penguins.

This is not Shackleton's Antarctica. The main US base is more like a mining colony anywhere on the fringes of civilization then what you think of when you think Antarctica. Its strangely modern and looks to be almost anywhere people mine. Indeed there is an odd shot of the modern camp with Scott's hut in the distance that signals how times have changed.

Herzog's film is really about some of the wayward travelers who have reached the frontier. Herzog is curious what sort of people they are and finds them to be a rather philosophical lot. They are what you would consider explorers of the 18th or 19th century looking for something greater then themselves. As one guy says "Where else do you find guys with Phds doing the dishes, or linguists on the one place on earth where there is no native language." Its an amusing portrait of people I think many of us would like to be.

We also get a portrait of what life is like there. Of the eternal sun (which annoys Herzog)Of the drabness of the living quarters (motel like)mixed with individual expression. We see the survival training, the various scientific studies going on (including one about penguins which cause Herzog to ponder if they go mad). and we see the landscape both above and below the ice on land and in the sea. These portraits of the land and seascapes are stunning. Herzog's ability to mix music and image creates some hypnotic passages that in part reminded me Koyaanisqatsi or Luc Besson's Atlantis. Its magical and creates sequences that you hate to see end.

If there is any flaw is that the film kind of just ends. There is a wonderful final quote by Alan Watts, but the film ultimately feels like a philosophical travelogue about a summer vacation instead of something grander then what I saw on my vacation. I'm sure had it not been Werner Herzog behind the camera I would not have been disappointed.

Still you must see the film on a big screen if you can. Its really beautiful at times. It will enlighten and inspire you- much more than this review will. And even though this is a Discovery Channel film, I'm glad I saw it where I did because there is something about the end credits with the seal songs echoing all thorough the theater from front to back that you can't get at home. The long confines of the Film Forum in New York really allows for the magic of a sound scape.

7.5 out of 10