| Overall Grade: |
C- |
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| Story: |
C- |
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| Acting: |
N/A |
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| Direction: |
C- |
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| Visuals: |
C+ |
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A DUD
by (movies profile)
Jul 4, 2008
3
of
7 people found this review helpful
How Herzog ever got a National Foundation of Science grant to make a documentary about Antarctica is something of an enigma. The scientific value of this film is nil and fulfills none of the NSF’s stated goals. Apparently these grants are given out rather liberally. Oh well, it’s only U.S. tax payer’s money.
Herzog’s raspy narration is intrusive, often frivolous and self-indulgent, in contrast to his nearly wordless “Lessons of Darkness,” an eerily beautiful, poetic vision of Iraq and Kuwait following Desert Storm. The film would have been better if Herzog had just shut up and disappeared into the subject matter, as he had in the earlier documentary. He may rightly deride Shackleton’s 1914 Antarctic Endurance Expedition as vainglorious, glory for the sake glory, but his own voyage is just as pointless, even as it is its antithesis, full of the wheezy ruminations of an exhausted dilettante artist and philosopher. Even the conclusion of this movie and its title, conjuring the end of the world, are baseless and completely subjective. Nothing prepares us for or justifies this pessimism. A casual, unsupported reference to global warming at the end just isn’t convincing, or called for. There’s nothing apocalyptic about this movie.
Herzog interviews multiple scientists, but shows no grasp of or interest in science. He has done no homework, no research. He leaves unchallenged a microbiologist’s assertion that the unicellular organism he is studying has “intelligence.” We barely understand the point of research on seals, why seal mother’s milk is being collected. Herzog asks a taciturn biologist if penguins commit suicide.
Aside from some nice underwater photography provided by Henry Kaiser, a trip down a volcano vent and an all-too-brief aerial glimpse of the ice shelf, this movie is visually dull. Instead, Herzog, an eccentric, fills the void with other eccentrics. A linguist laments the loss of languages, even though Antarctica has never had a native tongue. Antarctica’s only performance artist tells us how she once rode for hundreds of miles down Central America on the back of a truck in a sewer pipe.
Herzog supposedly intends to air this on the Discovery Channel. I would wait till then to see it, if ever. |
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