Directed by Werner Herzog. (STC) 99 min. Opens June 27.
At this point, after the Zak Penn collaborations, the lecture-circuit grandstanding and countless references to the “ecstatic truth,” it’s difficult to take Werner Herzog all that seriously. But a movie like Encounters at the End of the World makes it hard to write him off. The film, which premiered last year at TIFF, finds cinema’s metaphysical Tarzan (a term coined by not-quite-fan Pauline Kael) off to Antarctica on the National Science Foundation’s dime. Herzog has been assigned to inventory the remarkable discoveries being made at the fortress-like McMurdo research station, but the babbling Bavarian is more interested in what compelled the various scientists, adventurers, and support personnel therein to go so far off the grid.
Of course he is. Herzog’s cinema is infested with questing, quixotic types and Encounters at the End of the World resonates with admiration for people plying complex trades — most of the “ologies” are alluded to at some point — in extreme conditions. Yet the director isn’t above undercutting his subjects’ obsessions for comic effect, but such dirty pool is part and parcel of the Herzog process. We get a film that’s reverent yet deadpan, and occasionally both at once, as in the oft-referenced vignette pitting a lone, demeneted penguin against the whole of creation —?leave it to Herzog to locate the Klaus Kinski of penguins.
This tonal tension abates during spectacular footage of underwater ice caves, images so unfathomably huge as to awe even a filmmaker who’s very nearly seen it all.