The Wild Blue Yonder

Dir: Werner Herzog

2005

****

Werner Herzog is an astounding film maker, a genre unto his own, largely self-taught and always looking at life from a different angle. His documentaries are outstanding and his fictional films breath-taking, but it is his other films, the fantastical documentaries (if you will), that never quite hit the mark for me. I suppose the problem with watching films such as The Wild Blue Yonder and Lessons of Darkness is that you worry that the fictional will affect his factual. His great documentaries are very real, but do his documentary-style fantasies cheapen them and make them less believable. If you’re true disciple of Herzog you won’t worry about such things, you’ll just sit back and let his work engulf you but as a film reviewer it has made me wonder. 2005’s The Wild Blue Yonder is a sci-fi narration by an Alien (played by Brad Dourif rather convincingly) that overlays re-contextualized documentary footage filmed by NASA (specifically footage taken by Atlantis in 1989 during its STS-34 mission) and underwater footage captured by Henry Kaiser during his 2001 trip to Antarctica. Kaiser, a musician and composer and good friend and collaborator of Herzog’s, spent two and a half months in Antarctica on a National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program grant and took hours of footage as a research diving assistant. I wouldn’t be surprised if his footage was the main source of influence on Herzog’s experimental film. Take away the archive footage and you’re just left with the rantings of Dourif, improvising a Herzog script – which I could personally watch all day long – but isn’t quite what most people expect from your typical film maker. It’s my kind of fantasy I will admit, although I think I like the idea more than I like the execution. It’s worth watching for the space/underwater scenes, the otherworldly pictures do help convince you that the supposed nonsense our alien friends is speaking of could indeed be plausible, and in that sense it is mission success – Herzog has, once again, made us think in way we probably never have before. I could be somewhat skeptical and suggest that Herzog playing the same two tricks he always plays; hypnotize and exploit but I don’t truly believe it. He’s a pioneer, some ideas will survive the test of time longer than others and even though much of the footage isn’t his, there is still no other film like it, his own Lessons of Darkness being the only one that comes close. It’s a totally different film, but my hope is that one day Herzog will do with The Wild Blue Yonder what he did with Little Dieter Needs to Fly and make it into a dramatized feature. His low-budget, nonconformist approach these days means it is unlikely but I can dream.