The Wild Blue Yonder

Wild Blue Yonder, The (2005)

** (out of 4)

An alien planet starts to die so their inhabitants head off to find life in another universe. Their ships eventually land on Earth and years later one of the surviving aliens (Brad Dourif) recalls their journey. This is an extremely bizarre science-fiction film but would you really expect anything less from Herzog? I wouldn't call this a bad film but at the same time I couldn't call it a good film either so I'm somewhere down the middle on it. I think it has a brilliant idea and for the most part the idea is created very well but in the end I couldn't help but feel this would have worked better as a forty-minute film instead of a feature length (even though it still only runs 75-minutes). The visual look of the film is quite impressive with various stock footage used to tell the story. The Antarctica footage, which Herzog would later use in his documentary Encounters of the End of the World, makes for a unique "frozen sky" of outer space. The underwater scenes are going to be alien just about to everyone watching the film so to use this as another alien outpost (outer space) was a very good idea. Dourif has gathered some heat for his performance but I'm sure it's exactly what the director wanted and overall I thought it was fine. It's certainly out there but any alien encounter would probably fit the term out there.

I caught this film on BBC4 while flicking through the channels last night. An hour and twenty minutes later I sat in front of my TV, knowing that I had experienced a work of rare film poetry. The plot (and here's the 'spoiler', not that it would spoil any enjoyment of the film), is that an alien from the Andromeda system (or a seriously confused human),played by Brad Dourif, who landed on Earth after fleeing his frozen world, tells the story of a group of Earth astronauts who travel to the frozen Andromedan planet and then come back to Earth. Brad Dourif tells his story from an abandoned city, full of half-finished buildings and broken trailers, that was to have been the mighty capital of Andromedans on Earth. The story is illustrated by footage of NASA missions, diving expeditions, physics lectures, and ancient news reels. What really makes it, however, is the soundtrack. I don't know what the music is, but it sounded like some version Mongolian yodelling. Juxtaposed with the images and storyline, the whole thing becomes strangely moving. Please don't expect a conventional Hollywood storyline- there a many long, apparently monotonous sequences, perhaps reminiscent of Space Odyssey. Just relax into it. If you have any depth, you will not be disappointed.

Well, you know you make friends and any good friend you don't abandon, no matter what.

We get old, things change. We relax into what we still imagine is risky adventure. And in friends we don't point out the reality that what might have been important then, isn't now.

Herzog is a friend, a good one. I've trusted him in the past and when he's let me down it has been honorably. So I'll come to anything he makes, even though I know sometimes I'll have to make excuses for him.

And that's what I have to do here, apologize, justify.

When Herzog approaches a project, you can see that it has only one conceptual thrust. Just one. That's been fine for me because he takes that one idea — whatever it is — to such extremes with such honesty and commitment it blossoms into levels that resonate.

The idea here is similar to one he has explored before: the images don't matter, anything can be used, even stock images. The story doesn't matter at all; any tripe can suffice, the more generic the better. There need be no point, no message, no root into your soul, or the group soul.

All we need is aeolian sound, edited in a way that corresponds in an obvious way with splashes of color. Its the rhythm of the thing, established aurally and only then visually, with the visual pace lagging. Its a way of letting us know that anyone who does this can impart religion of any content.

Throughout is a supposedly wised up guy constantly reminding us that he could have told us so.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Most of the reviews of this movie on here are negative. I can TOTALLY see where they are coming from, but it seems that everyone else's LEAST favorite parts are what transfixed me. Yes, some of the astronauts-in-space shots went on a bit long, but the music is so beautiful. The opera, tribal music, and string instruments used throughout the film, to me anyway, illustrated the beauty contained in the unknown and unknowable. The shots under the "frozen sky" really DO look like an alien landscape. They are beautifully shot, and bring with them a feeling of both freedom and claustrophobia. And Brad Dourif's voice, his eyes, they make him a more convincing alien that ANY million-dollar sci-fi blockbuster. Just a man kicking dirt at the side of the road, so upset as his (and OUR) failings. If you have PATIENCE, try this movie.

We are by now quite commonly aware of the various statistics illustrating our remoteness from our nearest supposedly 'habitable' planet, that even Alpha Centauri, a very close neighbour, is some 3 light years off and many hundreds of years travelling at conventional means (that would be our fastest rocket propulsion in a vacuum, and a slingshot trajectory). But there was something about Herzog's description of this fact, spoken directly into the camera by a suitably intense Brad Dourif (though this is Brad's forte), that hit home, that filled me with that sense of wonder, that was also also tinged with dread. Perhaps it was the context, Herzog's narrative about alien travellers having many generations ago escaped their distant and dying world to eventually arrive here on Earth, attempt to colonise and then witness generations later, humanity's own attempts to escape the dying Earth and seek out a barely habitable world across space.

There is a primary loneliness in this concept, especially so in the human's arrival at that very same long-abandoned world, deciding to cope as best as they can with the liquid-helium atmosphere. Nothing like earth but then nothing else like Earth was anywhere discovered.

This feast of philosophical posers is coloured with actual Nasa on-board shuttle footage, that, although initially falls short of complementing the science-fantasies of the narration, does eventually blend successfully. And by the time this is settled the viewer is already drawn in. The thoughts and visions being presented us, the zero-g astronauts and ice-divers floating to the semi-atonal wailing in Ernst Reijseger's soundtrack, have put us in a place of submission and meditation rare for cinema. It would be interesting to know whether Herzog created this story line around the Nasa footage or the inverse. For by the end of the film, everything is convincing.

A very unusual cine-poem that will stand up to repeat viewing. For i know each time i will come away with the feeling i have been infused with some ethereal wisdom.

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