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Simply A Masterpiece

Pretty Good

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

I just watched Werner Herzog's 2005 science fiction fantasy film The Wild Blue Yonder, and am left in that rare position of not having much to say of the film that could really change the opinion of a viewer, pro or con, toward it. This is not because it is good nor bad, simply because it is one of those works of art that is not even on a good/bad scale. It is beyond such reckoning, a purely aural and visual experience for most of its 81 minutes, and thus has an effect similar to the phantasmagoric end of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.The narrative, however slight, is this: the alien (Dourif) comes to earth some decades ago, in a Third Wave of colonizers, before the supposed 1947 Roswell UFO crash, because his home planet entered an Ice Age. Upon landing, they attempted to establish their own version of Washington, D.C. out in the California desert, thus justifying Dourif's rants out in a ghost town. Their failure leads him to the conclusion that all aliens suck- a point he repeatedly hammers home. It also lets him go on about how mankind has ecologically ravaged the earth. He speaks of his CIA involvement, and more found footage, of the Jovian Galileo mission, allows him to hypothesize on the Roswell matter. Then he claims that the aliens brought with them microbial diseases. NASA launches a space mission to find inhabitable planets, but none are found in the Milky Way, until, via silly mathematics, a gateway to the Andromeda galaxy is found- one even the aliens did not know of. As the earth is getting more and more uninhabitable humans, who shortcutted their way to the alien Andromedan world, decide to explore it. Cue the Antarctic ice footage, meant to portray the frozen atmosphere and liquid helium ocean of The Wild Blue Yonder. While intensely beautiful and hypnotically mixed with the oral sounds of a bunch of Sardinian singers and an African singer, the film becomes really indescribable- but not in that good nor bad way. You just have to watch, whether you like or dislike it. When it's done, we see that the humans have returned to earth, aged only 15 years (comparisons of the archival footage vs. that Herzog shot for interviews) while the earth went through 820 years, and reverted to a wild state. Humans left the earth, and now treat it as a planetary game preserve. In the audio commentary, Herzog reveals that shots of the high green plateau that ends the film were from Venezuela, part of the leftover footage from his earlier film The White Diamond.This film will doubtlessly bore many people, and it will turn off still others for a plenum of possible reasons, and in no way, shape, nor form, is this a masterpiece on par with the best in Herzog's oeuvre. But, even if one views it in the worst way, and calls it a daring failure, it is a film worth watching again. One day soon, I will.

Wild Blue Yonder, The (2005) ** (out of 4) An alien planet starts to die so their inhabitants head off to find life in another universe. Their ships eventually land on Earth and years later one of the surviving aliens (Brad Dourif) recalls their journey. This is an extremely bizarre science-fiction film but would you really expect anything less from Herzog? I wouldn't call this a bad film but at the same time I couldn't call it a good film either so I'm somewhere down the middle on it. I think it has a brilliant idea and for the most part the idea is created very well but in the end I couldn't help but feel this would have worked better as a forty-minute film instead of a feature length (even though it still only runs 75-minutes). The visual look of the film is quite impressive with various stock footage used to tell the story. The Antarctica footage, which Herzog would later use in his documentary Encounters of the End of the World, makes for a unique "frozen sky" of outer space. The underwater scenes are going to be alien just about to everyone watching the film so to use this as another alien outpost (outer space) was a very good idea. Dourif has gathered some heat for his performance but I'm sure it's exactly what the director wanted and overall I thought it was fine. It's certainly out there but any alien encounter would probably fit the term out there.

Ranging from boring to excruciating, this film combines an hour of stock footage, a bizarre & often unpleasant soundtrack, grating narration, overacting by the only actor, and an uncompelling and often incomprehensible story to create a near utter waste of an hour and a quarter.Brad Dourif is unlikeable in the only significant role, and his enunciation during the narration is often strange and unpleasant. Sadly, this narration is the only respite the viewer receives from otherwise interminable scenes of stock footage of astronauts and scuba divers floating about. I suppose these sequences are meant to be profound; I found them exceptionally tedious. They are not helped by the accompanying music. I also failed to suspend my disbelief when, presented with footage of Arctic divers, I was told that this was astronauts exploring a planet with a "sky made of ice" above a liquid hydrogen environment. Points are for a mildly intriguing initial ten minutes and a somewhat interesting scientific discussion of wormhole travel.3/10

I made the mistake of thinking I was about to watch the Herzog documentary Rescue Dawn was based on, but i soon found out I was wrong...very wrong. Instead, I spent 81 minutes watching "a science fiction fantasy" titled Wild Blue Yonder. In WBY Brad Dourif play an alien who narrates his way through NASA and arctic diving footage that Herzog interestingly uses completely out of context. The context is entrusted to Dourif's character who spins an elaborate yarn of human space exploration to his former home, the exploration of this distant planet and the astronaut's return to a future, pre-historic earth almost 200 years later.WBY is essentially a found footage film, albeit an imaginative and interesting one. The highlight is the diving footage which truly feels like exploration of a alien world. The footage is hypnotic, perfectly accompanied by the equally hypnotic score by composer Ernst Reijsiger along with a song thrown indy rock genius Jim O'Rourke.Herzog sandwiches interviews with real-life mathematicians between the found footage segments, adding credibility to Dourif's yarn. Yet overall there is a sense of tongue-in-cheek behind WBY -- Herzog obviously doesn't want us to take things too seriously. But if he doesn't, then what does he want? By taking these images out of context he forces us to shift our perspective and see them with new eyes. He succeeds and by doing so, he begs the question: why don't we always change our perspective when looking at the world around us? If we did there's a good chance we would be less likely to take things for granted and instead we would see the world with the amazement of a child's eyes.http://eattheblinds.blogspot.com/