IslandGuru Who payed the critics

SoftInloveRox Horrible, fascist and poorly acted

Solidrariol Am I Missing Something?

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

chaos-rampant Herzog is one of few I trust to snap my eye open with just an image, he's done it a few times by this point. When he won't, he will still intrigue, invite me to swims unknown. He has powerful intuitions, will venture where the ground trembles with disorder and once there is spontaneous enough to let it climb up through the soles of the feet.It's a German kind of duende that colors his world; the urge or passion a singer cannot quite put to words and responds to with song. I may disagree with him on conclusions of that duende about the cosmos and the futility of endeavor, but I trust him as explorer and soul.He's in Antarctica here, another desolate landscape outside of maps that beckons in a most primal way. It's where Scotts and Shackletons wrecked themselves, and why. He enters as as anyone else might these days; by plane, one more sleepy traveler among dozens. If you know a bit about him, you will observe a few things.He is pleased to find McMurdo base looking like a drab construction site with machinery tearing up the ground, confirming his views of a fundamentally wretched humanity that fouls the earth. He is as pleased to find a forklift operator on the scene who very poetically describes his presence there as a desire to fall off the edge of the world. It's why Herzog has been in most places.He is enormously pleased to find that all Antarctica newcomers must be drilled on white-out conditions by wearing buckets on their heads and stumbling after each other while tethered to a rope. You can almost feel his exhilaration when they have to reach a certain point in this state but find themselves in a jumble in the opposite direction.He includes a tidbit about researchers studying seals, extracting milk from the mothers while claiming they want to be able to study the animals in their natural state. It mirrors Herzog's own endeavor of perturbing to extract truth about it. He tickles us with these researchers; the milk is being collected for studies on weight-loss.He has the researchers lay down with their ear pressed to the ice, harking for calls of seals from below that sound like Pink Floyd (which are artificially edited on top of the scene). There is a whole world down there that ebbs and calls. It's the world Herzog has sought to portray.An oceanologist had previously explained that the Antarctica - standing for a broader cosmos - is not a big, inert slab of ice as thought in Shackleton's time but an organic entity that is rippling out change. He mentions icebergs the size of Texas that will one day head north, saying this with a mad glint in the eye.He finds an entry into that world below via divers. He gives us fluorescent jellyfish undulating in eerie blue silence. This world is constant struggle, one of the divers confirms. The link is made to a precarious humanity, perched on the outer layer of unfriendly chaos, this time via sci-fi movies.So far we haven't had ecstatic truth of the kind which he favors. He finds it in a disoriented penguin that heads inland towards certain death all by himself. I have still only described parts, there is more to see. It points altogether to a certain cosmology.Yes, he has constructed on the way, intruded upon the subject, made it a point to include the bits we have while omitting others. You can imagine that he has sifted through a lot of otherwise unexciting footage. He has staged most of what you'll see. You can tell how well he has (or not) by noting that he first encountered the lone, intrepid penguin and then went back to set it up by filming the exchange where he asks the penguin researcher about insanity among penguins. It couldn't have taken place the other way.I would disagree in parts, or with the temerity of the physicist who explains on camera about neutrinos as coming from another dimension. It's up to us anyway to choose how to perceive ourselves and our struggle, the universe neither cares nor doesn't. It simply provides the building blocks and vistas. But he's a trusted explorer with good intuitions and here's why. This isn't the natural world of Koyannisqatsi, fundamentally pure and being imbalanced by us. Herzog finds a world with disorder and transience built right in, and welcomes the fact. He's more spiritual than he would admit.

redwillowscom This was a terrible documentary about a wonderful thing. The beauty and mystery of everything in the film is worthy of a much better filmmaker. In one sitting, he merges information about volcanos, neutrinos, and penguins. It's very disjointed. He excites us with philosophical questions, then switches the subject entirely. It's like a film school student was trying to make something edgy, but his professor never got to edit it before they published it. I had to mute the Gothic music he decided to play over the clips of diving under the iceberg. I wanted to feel the solemn silence that scientists must feel down there. I wanted to let my mind run where it may, but instead I kept having to think to myself "Why is there a man yodeling?" (his choice of soundtrack anytime anything of interest was on screen). When he was interviewing scientists who were talking about their passion, you could feel their excitement as they spoke. But Werner insisted on constantly panning in on them, taking away any hope of subtlety. He featured pointless interviews with bus drivers that I expected to have lead up to the reason why they had found themselves in Antarctica, but didn't. The whole time I thought it would eventually tie up together at the end, but that never happened and I was extremely disappointed with the entire thing.

nikolamnt As Herzog says at the very beginning of the film, "Encounters at the end of the world" is not another movie about penguins. Rather, it is a visually stunning story about weird and wonderful people living at the end of the world (i.e. at the Antarctica's McMurdo station), as well as about humankind's relationship to the nature. My husband and I immediately got sucked into the life of the biggest permanent US settlement on the South Pole, the peculiarities of its inhabitants, and the magic of the Antarctic ice, its breathtaking landscapes and soundscapes.The best thing about the movie is Herzog's apparent affection towards people who dedicated their lives to adventure, dreams, and pursuit of knowledge regardless of personal comfort. Herzog represented people from McMurdo with warmth and generosity, skillfully illuminating their hidden depths and lovable weirdness in just a few minutes.Another great thing is that the muddy streets of McMurdo, caterpillars, and lonesome outposts create the impression of how life in the Wild West could have looked like – as well as how a future human settlement on Moon may be organized.Additionally, Herzog's voice, in English with a distinct German accent, is pure joy to listen to.After seeing the film, you will probably want to visit the Antarctica (perhaps the only place on Earth where philosophers ride forklifts with pleasure), or at least to go and watch the film again.

filmalamosa I rarely give an 8 to a film. This one deserves it. Herzog has managed to make an intelligent--yes that is the right word survey of the human endeavor in Antarctica.It is foremost a movie about people most of them are interesting especially the low key ones like the philosopher. There are however plenty of ego flaunting obnoxious ones like the woman "who traveled across Africa in a garbage truck". Unfortunately places like Antarctica attract and bring out that crowd of people--ones seeking some kind of identity through the "zaniness" of their experiences including of course being in Antarctica.Herzog subtly cuts them off at the knees when deserved such as saying we were glad to get out of McMurdo after an interview with someone claiming how important an ice cream machine was.Watch it you will like it.