What the? This astoundingly painful patchwork of filched free footage, oddball tribal music and an old dude with a ponytail portraying an exotic alien from Andromeda (which, by the way, is a galaxy with 100 billion stars, not an ice bound planet with jellyfish), has been greeted with mega gushes from smitten Herzog fans who diligently seek meaning where there is none. As the title of this review would suggest, I, and a very few others it seems, can see the old boy's bum.
The plot has been recounted many times in these reviews, so I will just hit the lowlights. Earthlings and Andromedans (perhaps they should call us Milky Wayans) switch planets because of mutually uninhabitable conditions at home. Doesn't sound too bad yet. Wait. The Earth people apparently make the two and one half million light year trip in a small earth orbiter from the late eighties utilizing an exotic technology announced by a smart looking guy standing in an orange grove. The uninhabitable nature of Earth is difficult to discern because of the traffic filled interstates in the background of one of the Andromedan's soliloquies.
Environmental consciousness abounds - for instance, film is preserved by using the same wistful shot of the alien but using different voice-overs on at least two occasions. Set expense is minimized by using a trailer junkyard and a ... something with columns perched on dirt. Script pages were saved by having insufferable lengths of time showing five or six people (the Earth contingent, I presume) floating in the space capsule and the same amounts of time consumed by other scenes of scuba divers and jellyfish. The musical score is a sort of eerie wailing which I contend was recorded by holding a microphone over the audience at the premier.
Hunter Thompson might have liked this picture, providing he was properly medicated. I didn't. If you want to see space journeys made in unlikely conveyances, I recommend The American Astronaut in which yokels from Oklahoma travel in space in a barn.
The plot has been recounted many times in these reviews, so I will just hit the lowlights. Earthlings and Andromedans (perhaps they should call us Milky Wayans) switch planets because of mutually uninhabitable conditions at home. Doesn't sound too bad yet. Wait. The Earth people apparently make the two and one half million light year trip in a small earth orbiter from the late eighties utilizing an exotic technology announced by a smart looking guy standing in an orange grove. The uninhabitable nature of Earth is difficult to discern because of the traffic filled interstates in the background of one of the Andromedan's soliloquies.
Environmental consciousness abounds - for instance, film is preserved by using the same wistful shot of the alien but using different voice-overs on at least two occasions. Set expense is minimized by using a trailer junkyard and a ... something with columns perched on dirt. Script pages were saved by having insufferable lengths of time showing five or six people (the Earth contingent, I presume) floating in the space capsule and the same amounts of time consumed by other scenes of scuba divers and jellyfish. The musical score is a sort of eerie wailing which I contend was recorded by holding a microphone over the audience at the premier.
Hunter Thompson might have liked this picture, providing he was properly medicated. I didn't. If you want to see space journeys made in unlikely conveyances, I recommend The American Astronaut in which yokels from Oklahoma travel in space in a barn.