I just watched Werner Herzog's 2005 science fiction fantasy film The Wild Blue Yonder, and am left in that rare position of not having much to say of the film that could really change the opinion of a viewer, pro or con, toward it. This is not because it is good nor bad, simply because it is one of those works of art that is not even on a good/bad scale. It is beyond such reckoning, a purely aural and visual experience for most of its 81 minutes, and thus has an effect similar to the phantasmagoric end of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The narrative, however slight, is this: the alien (Dourif) comes to earth some decades ago, in a Third Wave of colonizers, before the supposed 1947 Roswell UFO crash, because his home planet entered an Ice Age. Upon landing, they attempted to establish their own version of Washington, D.C. out in the California desert, thus justifying Dourif's rants out in a ghost town. Their failure leads him to the conclusion that all aliens suck- a point he repeatedly hammers home. It also lets him go on about how mankind has ecologically ravaged the earth. He speaks of his CIA involvement, and more found footage, of the Jovian Galileo mission, allows him to hypothesize on the Roswell matter. Then he claims that the aliens brought with them microbial diseases. NASA launches a space mission to find inhabitable planets, but none are found in the Milky Way, until, via silly mathematics, a gateway to the Andromeda galaxy is found- one even the aliens did not know of. As the earth is getting more and more uninhabitable humans, who shortcutted their way to the alien Andromedan world, decide to explore it. Cue the Antarctic ice footage, meant to portray the frozen atmosphere and liquid helium ocean of The Wild Blue Yonder. While intensely beautiful and hypnotically mixed with the oral sounds of a bunch of Sardinian singers and an African singer, the film becomes really indescribable- but not in that good nor bad way. You just have to watch, whether you like or dislike it. When it's done, we see that the humans have returned to earth, aged only 15 years (comparisons of the archival footage vs. that Herzog shot for interviews) while the earth went through 820 years, and reverted to a wild state. Humans left the earth, and now treat it as a planetary game preserve. In the audio commentary, Herzog reveals that shots of the high green plateau that ends the film were from Venezuela, part of the leftover footage from his earlier film The White Diamond.
This film will doubtlessly bore many people, and it will turn off still others for a plenum of possible reasons, and in no way, shape, nor form, is this a masterpiece on par with the best in Herzog's oeuvre. But, even if one views it in the worst way, and calls it a daring failure, it is a film worth watching again. One day soon, I will.
The narrative, however slight, is this: the alien (Dourif) comes to earth some decades ago, in a Third Wave of colonizers, before the supposed 1947 Roswell UFO crash, because his home planet entered an Ice Age. Upon landing, they attempted to establish their own version of Washington, D.C. out in the California desert, thus justifying Dourif's rants out in a ghost town. Their failure leads him to the conclusion that all aliens suck- a point he repeatedly hammers home. It also lets him go on about how mankind has ecologically ravaged the earth. He speaks of his CIA involvement, and more found footage, of the Jovian Galileo mission, allows him to hypothesize on the Roswell matter. Then he claims that the aliens brought with them microbial diseases. NASA launches a space mission to find inhabitable planets, but none are found in the Milky Way, until, via silly mathematics, a gateway to the Andromeda galaxy is found- one even the aliens did not know of. As the earth is getting more and more uninhabitable humans, who shortcutted their way to the alien Andromedan world, decide to explore it. Cue the Antarctic ice footage, meant to portray the frozen atmosphere and liquid helium ocean of The Wild Blue Yonder. While intensely beautiful and hypnotically mixed with the oral sounds of a bunch of Sardinian singers and an African singer, the film becomes really indescribable- but not in that good nor bad way. You just have to watch, whether you like or dislike it. When it's done, we see that the humans have returned to earth, aged only 15 years (comparisons of the archival footage vs. that Herzog shot for interviews) while the earth went through 820 years, and reverted to a wild state. Humans left the earth, and now treat it as a planetary game preserve. In the audio commentary, Herzog reveals that shots of the high green plateau that ends the film were from Venezuela, part of the leftover footage from his earlier film The White Diamond.
This film will doubtlessly bore many people, and it will turn off still others for a plenum of possible reasons, and in no way, shape, nor form, is this a masterpiece on par with the best in Herzog's oeuvre. But, even if one views it in the worst way, and calls it a daring failure, it is a film worth watching again. One day soon, I will.
