Dispatches From Beyond, via Herzog
Herzog’s “Wild Blue Yonder,” a “science fiction fantasy.”
The title of the most recent Werner Herzog film to land in theaters refers to the brilliant cerulean color of the watery world that an extraterrestrial — played by the character actor Brad Dourif, naturally enough — calls home. A few minutes into “The Wild Blue Yonder,” though, and it seems clear that the title also refers to Mr. Herzog’s imagination, which remains as richly inventive as it is, at times, bafflingly, wonderfully alien.
Whatever their relative charms and flaws, and despite the seeming variety of their subjects, Mr. Herzog’s forays into nonfiction film have one thing in common: they make most documentaries look bad. It isn’t only that he often inserts himself into his films, disdaining any pretense of disinterest and thereby forcing the focus to return to the samepoint of origin: namely himself. (And why not, since he’s generally more interesting than his stated subject?) It’s also that Mr. Herzog can’t help but make beautiful objects, whether working exclusively with original material or, as he did in “Grizzly Man,” his remarkable documentary about the self-styled naturalist Timothy Treadwell, making liberal use of extant images.
An artful mixture of carefully culled and originally produced material, “The Wild Blue Yonder,” which opens with an almost hilariously unnecessary declaration that it is “a science fiction fantasy,” purports to tell the story of an alien species, whose misfortunes are narrated throughout the film in bits and pieces by one of its own, the Andromedan (Mr. Dourif). Standing in front of mounds of refuse and a temple-like ruin that looks like a back-lot relic, the Andromedan tells of a people who, much like a few of the wiser inhabitants of Krypton, looked to space as a refuge from a doomed planet. “I come from another
galaxy, a blue one, way, way beyond your world,” says the Andromedan, peering into the camera. You better believe it.
Mr. Dourif makes a persuasive alien presence, but he is far from the strangest creature to inhabit “The Wild Blue Yonder.” That distinction belongs to a real astronaut who lists gently in zero gravity with a face drained of evident emotion, and to a jellyfish that, later in the film, glides underwater with similarly mesmerizing grace and indifference. These beings populate two seemingly different worlds that Mr. Herzog, incongruously and with great lyrical feeling, eventually fuses into one. The Andromedan may be a brother from another planet or merely seeking asylum from a loony bin, but the wild blue yonder he
speaks of so fondly looks awfully close to home.
The floating astronaut belongs to the crew of the shuttle that launched the Galileo spacecraft in 1989. Using a 16-millimeter film camera, the crew members shot themselves inside the cramped interior, eating, exercising, talking and
pecking away at computers, mundane activities that here seem otherworldly precisely because they are happening in zero gravity. Hypnotic in their own right, these images, along with some spectacular underwater material from the Antarctic, would seem like dispatches from the beyond even if Mr. Herzog hadn’t hijacked them for his own purposes. The cumulative sense of the unreality of all these other worlds only deepens when the filmmaker checks in with some mathematicians who, through talking-head interviews and super-cool graphics, prove that the only thing more far out than Werner Herzog is reality.
At once a cautionary evolutionary tale and a flight of filmmaking fancy, “The Wild Blue Yonder” works better as an experience than it does conceptually. Mr. Herzog has gathered a trove of ravishing images in which you can get lost,
especially if you don’t get hung up on how they fit together. Sometimes the pieces snap neatly into place, as when the Andromedan raps about how a species went searching for a new world only to build a couple of shopping malls;
sometimes, as when fragments of ice swirl underwater like snow, the images have no reason beyond beauty. There is pleasure in such useless beauty, of course, and pleasure too in drifting with the jellyfish amid the wild blue yonder of a
great filmmaker’s imagination.
THE WILD BLUE YONDER
Opens today in Manhattan.
Written and directed by Werner Herzog; directors of photography, Tanja Koop, Henry Kaiser, the astronauts and Klaus Scheurich; edited by Joe Bini; music by Ernst Reijseger; produced by Christine Le Goff, Andre Singer and Lucki Stipetic; released by 518 Media. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas at Third Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 81 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: Brad Dourif (the Alien); Capt. Donald Williams, Dr. Ellen Baker, Franklin Chang-Diaz, Shannon Lucid and Michael McCulley (the astronauts); and Roger Diehl, Ted Sweetser and Martin Lo (the mathematicians)
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