Customer Rating:  
Summary: The Wild Blue Yonder
Comment: Weird, will definitely be a cult favorite. Found the underwater photography/video a little disappointing.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I want my 80 minutes back
Comment: Apparently, this "film" won an award at the Venice Biennale. I happened to visit the Biennale last year, and I saw a few of the films on display. If you are the type of person who watches 30 minutes of video of a tree, or a woman standing in front of a wall, and calls it "compelling" or "an amazing use of negative space", then why are you reading this review? Go buy this DVD immediately, because you are going to love it. Your ability to appreciate all of that stock footage of the space shuttle interior set to cello music will demonstrate once again your superior level of discernment when compared to those degenerates who demand things from movies like "plot" and "acting" and "film that the filmmaker actually shot himself rather than getting it for free off the NASA B-reel". The best way to watch this thing is with your eyes closed, because some of the music is lovely. The rest of the film is garbage. Whoever wrote the cover copy that compares "Wild Blue Yonder" to "2001" and "Metropolis" should issue an immediate apology to anyone who bought or rented the DVD on that basis and thereby had their entire evening ruined.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Scientifically Illiterate Vogon Poetry.
Comment: Some would argue that this is "art" and should not be judged in the same way as conventional "entertainment" films are. That might be true to some extent, but I contend that it is really just a very poorly made, poorly acted, poorly narrated, poorly conceived failure.
I picked it up thinking, "Cool, a science fiction film by an avant-garde director with an environmentalist message. Right up my alley." What followed was a brief period of bafflement, followed by disbelief and outrage as I realized how horrible this movie is.
This is movie features extensive use of NASA footage (mostly inside scenes of the space shuttle and lectures/interviews) and some truly beautiful Antarctic undersea footage. Okay so far. It has a strange and beautiful soundtrack, also very much okay as far as I'm concerned.
But the story... Fearing contamination from an alien disease, NASA sends up an ad-hoc space shuttle mission which immediately determines (via badly repurposed SOHO and other solar observatory footage) that the entire Milky Way galaxy is inhospitable, so we'd better go to the edge of the Amdromeda Galaxy instead. In the space shuttle. Using completely bastardized Lagrange Point orbital mechanics (a cool lecture in its natural context) to magically transit the 3 or so million light years to Andromeda overnight. The astronauts then spend two days scuba diving in the liquid helium (-260 deg. C) planet they find there, and decide that this is (of course) the perfect place to put a new base. They then travel (forward) in time (not relativistically, but parallel-universtacularly) while being transmuted into pure light and reassembled back on a now-abandoned Earth, which shore looks purty without all those people. Roll credits.
All that might be forgiven if... um... uh.... No, all that is unforgivable. But it's made significantly worse by the flat performance turned in by the film's only actor, Brad Dourif. His is by far the weakest performance in the film.
If I were one of the scientists whose work was quoted in this movie, I would be so unhinged by the ordeal as to waste the rest of my days searching for ways to go back in time in a trans-galactic wormhole-surfing space shuttle to dip Werner Herzog in liquid helium and prevent this film from being completed. Sadly, the time for proactively dipping Werner Herzog in liquid helium is gone forever. But it is (hopefully) not too late for you to turn your back on this pretentious atrocity. Run, I beg of you. It's too late for me; save yourselves.
(An addendum: Don't believe the reviewers who imply that people who dislike this movie simply lack the sophistication to appreciate it for what it is. I enjoyed the original Russian "Solaris", which is certainly no popcorn movie. And one of my favorites of all time is "Koyaanisqatsi" - a film which consists entirely of plotless, soundless documentary footage with a score that prominently features toneless Hopi vocals. So I can appreciate the avant garde, and I still say this is the worst film I've ever seen. Honest. You're better off watching two hours of security camera footage from an empty underground parking garage.)
Customer Rating:
Summary: hither or yonder?
Comment: Well this one is a real puzzle. There are three main scenes in this: that's not a spoiler; it's shown on the packaging. There's a derelict building, weightless astronauts on a spaceship, and divers under ice. That's all real and shot on location. However the plot and its location is something else and is overlaid onto a reality that we're only too aware of.
I guess this one is really about perception, and I found I had to work very hard to doublethink two perceptions at once - particularly as I used to function in one of those elements myself, as a scuba diving instructor.
Herzog appears to put his cards on the table in this one: the step that humanity made between hunter-gathering and settled farming (or civilisation) is what started the ecological destruction of our planet. But this film is more than that.
As always, Herzog is celebrating the beauty of our world and of our inner life with fantastic camera work. Just enjoy it. That is enough. If it makes you swap your car for public transport, and you decide to use fewer aeroplanes and plastics, then good on you. But the beauty of the light and colour shining through the ice, and the grace of the floating astronauts is more than that.
Customer Rating:
Summary: not his best
Comment: I'd say that "The Wild Blue Yonder" isn't Herzog's best film. It lacks the passion that I find in other films of his, but some of the visuals are worth it. For Herzog fans, I think it's worth seeing, if for no other reason than to gain further insight to his film making and style.
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