debbieg-03269 Werner Herzog is a living legend in my opinion and this film explains why. He is willing to go to the edge of the world to find meaning and purpose- and he finds them in people, geographical objects and even penguins. Herzog goes to a base camp in Antarctica to learn about the inhabitants and why they are there. We learn about the kind of people and the kind of mindset they possess. But this isn't just a point and shoot interview. Featuring gorgeous but humbling vistas of the ice sheets and barren white land there is a poetic quality to the work. A scene featuring a lone penguin walking to its impending doom reeks of existentialist pain. This is a fantastic documentary by the amazing Werner Herzog.

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.

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.

Red-Barracuda Werner Herzog is unique in his ability to make both fiction and non-fiction films that are equally fascinating, original and beautiful. With Encounters at the End of the World he takes us to the most unforgivingly remote place on the planet: Antarctica. But Herzog does not make normal documentaries, so do not expect this to be a typical natural world film. Instead we have a film that is as interested in the people who have chosen to live in this place, as much as the beauties of its natural landscape. In keeping with the director's previous preoccupations this is another look at outsiders and dreamers. The people who live here have chosen to do so for a variety of reasons but what seems to tie them all together is a certain individuality; one that Herzog can identify with.The imagery captured is often poetic in its beauty. We see underwater sequences of life below the ice, a large volcano in the middle of the continent and a penguin wandering insanely in the direction of the distant mountains to its doom, like a crazed hero in a Herzog movie such as Aguirre. There are many small moments of the bizarre that stay long with you such as the stories about microscopic sea-monsters and icebergs the size of Ireland. He captures other unexpected surreal moments such as the tunnel where things are preserved; the fish encased deep in the ice, preserved forever. And only an eccentric such as Herzog would ever ask a penguin expert if there were instances of the birds going insane or practising homosexuality.The film is divided in its view of man's existence in Antarctica and exploration in general. Herzog clearly disliked the ugly settlement of McMurdo and is saddened that Antarctica could not have been left alone. Yet a romantic spirit as adventurous as Herzog is equally fascinated by it and is of course compelled to explore its mysteries. It's another very personal documentary from one of the most consistently interesting film-makers around.