Encounters At The End of The World

Werner Herzog heads off to Antarctica to film this philosophical documentary that is less a treatise than a breezy, but compelling, summary of the Great Southern, Southern Land.

We meet people that are as strange and bizarre as the continent they live in and Herzog juxtaposes interviews with people sharing their life stories with barren, beautiful landscapes and a penguin who decides to explore the interior of Antarctica.

All is calm, all is white.

Note also the occasionally grating soundtrack, which nevertheless sometimes borders on beautiful. And the techno-esque cries of the seals are especially otherworldly and are the perfect national anthem to this cold continent.

It is filmed carefully and beautifully. Standouts include the underwater alien landscape that brought Herzog here in the first place. The interviews are merely the sideshows, kind of like footnotes that only some of us may be interested in, but it does add colour to the film when we meet a linguist on a continent with no languages and a philosopher who drives tractors and talks like a mystic.