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Very disappointing...

Beautiful, moving film.

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

"There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization." - Werner HerzogAnother apocalyptic tale from director Werner Herzog, "Lessons of Darkness" was filmed in Kuwait during the aftermath of the first Gulf War, and primarily consists of long, slow, swooping helicopter shots, all of which depict Arab landscapes covered in oil, ravaged by war and dotted with burning oil fields. The film ends with wordless shots of firefighters extinguishing flaming oil spills, before relighting them.The film has been accused of ignoring all political and historical context. This is partially true, but Herzog admits this himself with two strategically placed interviews in which we meet a woman who cannot speak and a son who has long lost the will to talk. The implication is that "Lessons of Darkness" is not a recounting of history but a grasp for some higher, ecstatic truth: namely that of oil obsessed white men repeatedly starting (and squelching) wars in foreign lands whilst locals suffer and are denied a voice. Today, of course, the West's Gulf War myths have been debunked and demythologized. Well known are stories about US misinformation, forged satellite photos, fake testimonies, the nurse Nayirah fiasco, the incubator lies and the fact that Saddam Hussein was a Western puppet. Even the tale of Iraqi forces setting Kuwaiti oil wells ablaze has been called into question, as a number of US soldiers have recently stepped forward and testified that they were themselves ordered to detonate explosive charges on some Kuwaiti wells.But Herzog is singularly uninterested in details. Instead he turns the Gulf War into a science fiction film, his audience forced to glide over alien terrain whilst witnessing stupid creatures setting their own planet ablaze. Misery, greed and ignorance cannot be escaped, and so the planet burns. Later Herzog documentaries adopt an even more apocalyptic tone, the director foretelling the end of our species altogether. 7.9/10 – At its worst, "Lessons of Darkness" aestheticizes and prettifies what should scar and horrify. See "Encounters at the End of the World", "The Wild Blue Yonder" and "The White Diamond" instead. Worth one viewing.

It is trite to say something is merely 'an experience', but that's all that one can truly say of Lessons Of Darkness. In a sense it is the sequel to Herzog's earlier mood film, Fata Morgana, from 1971, and even appears on the same DVD package with that film. Is Lessons Of Darkness profound? No. But that presumes it has an intellectual content. It has very little. Poetry abounds, especially the unconscious sort, and in Herzog's voiceovers, quoting from the Book of Revelations. Is it an anti-war film? Not really. It has been called such by many critics, but they tend to miss a lot. Reductionists often cannot see that a real artist, especially a great one like Herzog, always has more going on up his sleeve than the predictable rabbit or ace in the hole, even if we are not exactly sure what that squirming mass is. Lessons Of Darkness is a primal, emotional film that abstracts ideas of war beyond the conventional good and bad axis, to become something utterly unto its own set of natural laws (both war and the film), and as such makes most criticism of it superfluous, even silly. But, that does not mean it does not have layers to it, nor that it is not art, nor great art. It is. Taste it.

Never call Werner Herzog a dilettante. When he sets out to make a film, he's willing to die for it. Although this film could have easily been adjusted to a pure documentary of the oil fires in Kuwait after the Iraq invasion, Herzog takes it to much higher levels. War. Apocalypse. Mythical Disaster. The End of Life as we knew it. THE Struggle (and, since this is made by a dark-visioned German, we do NOT win the struggle. At best, we earn a temporary truce with the Devil.) This is perhaps the MOST BEAUTIFULLY PHOTOGRAPHED COLOR film I've EVER seen. Bar none. The scoring, as usual, is unique and perfect. "Lessons of Darkness" is atypically vague for a film in my category "Life Changers", yet I am left extremely moved by the powerful effects of an exquisite visual and audio work of Art.

Herzog has been making brilliant films since the late '60s, and frankly it's a bit of a pain in the arse keeping up with such a prolific director. However, if you are a fan of his features and staggering documentary work, "Lessons of/in Darkness" demands your immediate attention. The film is essentially a birds-eye view (often quite literally) of the plague of oil-choked death, fire, chaos and destruction that resulted from the brief but grotesquely internecine technological blitzkrieg of the Gulf War. Herzog, of course, takes particular interest in the seeming madness of the crews of mercernary American firefighters that are putting out the oil well fires across the deserts. Various points on the conflict and its aftermath inevitably bubble to the surface, but arise without overt proselytizing. The images do the majority of the talking. And they are eye-popping. Startling, frightening visuals that stand out even in the Herzog canon -- great vistas of blackness and glowing terror that would make any sci-fi director soylent green with envy. They are accompanied by little else: brief interstitials, an almost nonexistent, terribly serious Herzog narrative and a ghostly and elegiac score. The short interviews with individuals who suffered are heartbreaking, perhaps all the more so due to their brevity. See this.