"It sucked. Nobody came, nobody settled, nobody shopped."
The Wild Blue Yonder (Werner Herzog, Germany/U.S.)
The Wild Blue Yonder is a visionary "Science Fiction Fantasy" from Werner Herzog that is both mesmerizing and fitfully hysterical. Brad Dourif (
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, "Deadwood") is the narrator of this piece and also appears on camera. He tells us he's an Alien from the Andromeda Galaxy, who came to Earth with many others of his kind after their world died. He recounts some of their history on our planet, though they are mostly embarassing failures involving flying machines, shopping malls and the CIA. Then the narrative - such as it is - becomes about an expedition of Earthlings that venture back to that distant planet of frozen liquid hydrogen and explore it in hopes of colonizing for us one day. All the footage that isn't Dourif in this movie is stock footage, mostly from NASA and divers in Antarctica, cut together to tell Herzog's wild blue tall tale. Oh, and my goodness the music! The amazing soundtrack is an otherworldly collaboration between a classically trained cellist from Vienna, a choir from Sardinia and a vocalist from Senegal. The music they create is hypnotic, stunning and overwhelming, and when combined with this fabulous and unusual footage as well as Herzog's darkly cynical yet somehow marvelously funny point of view (the rants about the sins of domesticating pigs and climbing mountains are Herzogian brilliance), the result on screen is cinematic poetry. Now if you go into this movie looking for any kind of standard narrative, even a documentary narrative, you will be sorely disappointed. But if you let the unique feel and sound of this film wash over you, you're in for quite a journey.
Actor Brad Dourif was in attendance at the screening, introduced the film and stuck around for Q&A afterward. He has some good anecdotes about Werner and his process (this is the second time they've worked together, the other being 1991's
Scream of Stone), and some information about the genesis of this project that makes it all the more interesting. Such as Herzog only tried to get access to the NASA footage after he heard James Cameron wanted to use it for something but was turned down in all his requests, thereby making it a mission for Werner to see if he could succeed where Cameron failed - he didn't even know what the footage really was at that point. And the diving footage was sent to Werner in connection with another project entirely - one that he wasn't at all interested in, a rather standard Jacques Cousteau type of straightforward nature bit that you can find on The Discovery Channel 24/7. But while he found the bulk of the footage ordinary, what fascinated him immediately was the extra material that was on the ends of the reels, the bits the divers shot that weren't at all intended for use. Those visuals combined with this idea he had of blending these disperate musical styles (which was apparently largely improvised in studio) and the idea that Aliens actually suck - that's just the kind of inspiration Werner Herzog thrives on. And it was also mentioned that when asked what he really thought about the exploration of space and the possibility of colonization off-world, Werner responeded quickly and bluntly, "It's all bullsh!t, we're never getting out of here." If that isn't pure Herzog, I don't know what is.
GRADE: A-
Kosmos kak Predchuvstvie - Dreaming of Space (Aleksei Uchitel, Russia)
Set in Russia near the Finnish border in the winter of 1957 after Sputnik's launch,
Dreaming of Space is a nice character piece and glimpse into how Russians view their own past. Yevgeni Mironov stars as "Horsie", a young man full of restless energy but naïve about how his meager hopes and dreams might survive in a small Communist town. At the gym he meets a tall, strong, mysterious man (Yevgeni Tsyganov) who he tries desperately to befriend. This man is everything Horsie is not: quiet, dignified and capable. Eventually the two men do develop a bond, though Horsie has suspicions about his new friend, as in he may be plotting an escape either by swimming for freedom or maybe even flying away somehow. Is this man a spy or a defector or, as he claims, a cosmonaut secretly training for the day they put a man into one of those rockets? Horsie is an interesting character, and well played by Mironov, and Tsyganov has great fun playing the more stoic yet still charming Gherman. The narrative gets a bit bogged down in plotlines invloving Horsie's girlfriend and her sister (Irina Pegova and Yelena Lyadova), and there are some intentionally awkward editing jumps toward the last third of the film that detract from the pace and tone that narrative had been traveling. But the loving recreation of late '50s Mother Russia and the souls left dreaming inside of her borders despite the cold darkness, drawing inspiration from each other and grand ideas like space travel, is delightful.
GRADE: B-