Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World chronicles his trip to Antarctica. The film is a personal travelogue, wintry in its humor and Nordic in its aggravated sense of impending doom, featuring the director as intrepid, but not entirely reliable tour guide.
Heir to the explorer-filmmakers of the silent era, Herzog has made a career documenting extreme landscapes (the Amazon, the Sahara, the Australian outback) and courting danger. He's scaled an active volcano on an abandoned Caribbean island, flown low over the flaming oil rigs of Desert Storm, mixed it up with the maddest of actors, and directed half a dozen movies starring Klaus Kinski.
Perhaps because Herzog is approaching old-master status, Encounters at the End of the World skews toward the observational. As in Grizzly Man, his 2005 portrait of a deranged bear lover, Herzog seems at least as fascinated with other people's obsessions as his own. Taking an Antarctica-bound military plane out of New Zealand, he ponders his fellow travelers, wondering who they are and what they dream. And like Grizzly Man, Encounters incorporates other people's material — namely producer Henry Kaiser's unearthly under-the-icecap photography and archival footage made nearly a century ago, in the course of the Shackleton expedition.
As discovered (or scripted), the U.S. settlement at McMurdo Sound is populated by an assortment of geeks, vagabonds, and loners — a plumber who displays elongated index fingers as evidence of his royal Aztec lineage, a guy looking to set a Guinness record in each continent, a middle-aged woman introduced with the words, "Back in the '80s, I took a garbage truck across Africa . . . " (Later, she appears in a McMurdo nightclub, performing an act that involves packing herself up in a piece of hand luggage.)
Ga-ga and irascible, claiming to loathe the sensation of the sun on his skin and complaining of being stuck in the "abomination" of McMurdo, Herzog amuses himself documenting "white-out" training, with the would-be explorers running absurdly through the snow, buckets over their heads, as they drift completely off-course. At last, he escapes to a research camp where, the scientists tell him, the silence is so absolute that you can hear your heart beat — not to mention the Pink Floyd-esque sounds with which the seals signal each other under the ice.
The world is upside down. Herzog is delighted to find a physicist engaged in a spiritual quest, searching for almost undetectable subatomic particles in a parallel universe. He films marine biologists sitting around watching the trailer for the 1954 mutant-giant-ant flick Them! and is pleased to learn that there's a "horrible, violent world" of hungry worms and carnivorous protoplasm thriving beneath the ice. Herzog means his movie's title to be taken literally — and not just because the polar ice is melting. The filmmaker enjoys imagining the end of the world — or rather, its afterlife, with the alien archaeologists of the future visiting our lifeless planet to ponder the meaning of a flower print framed in a garland of frozen popcorn.
Because Encounters at the End of the World was, like Grizzly Man, produced by the Discovery Channel, Herzog takes care to inoculate himself against New Age sentimentality — making many mocking references to "tree huggers" and "whale huggers" — and avoids feel-good anthropomorphism. Although not specifically mentioned, his bête noire is March of the Penguins, the wildly popular animal doc that opened opposite Grizzly Man. When he does visit penguin land, Herzog immediately questions the birds' imagined family values, asking a painfully diffident scientist whether there are gay penguins. The naturalist ponders the question and suggests that penguin threesomes and even prostitution are not unknown.
Herzog isn't satisfied: "Is there such a thing as insanity among penguins?" he demands. "Could they just go crazy because they've had enough of their colony?" (Could they just go to Antarctica?) Before the scientist can answer, the filmmaker cuts to a single bird, shown in long shot waddling away from its colleagues toward the interior mountains and, as Herzog notes, certain death. This penguin marches to its own tune.
Herzog may loathe the projection of human attributes onto the animal kingdom, but he's managed to find one of his antiheroes: There's no mistaking his point that the doomed, irrational creature is us.
