Movie review: Encounters at the End of the World

irector Werner Herzog exposes what's beneath the Antarctic surface. Photo / Supplied

Rating: * * *
Verdict: Rambling but fascinating.

With his newest venture, endlessly curious German chronicler of the offbeat Werner Herzog becomes the first person to have shot a film on each of the seven continents. And he promises in the opening minute that his Antarctic film will not be "another movie about penguins".

Rather, his focus is on the infinitely more exotic human inhabitants - a one-time banker who drives a 30-tonne bus; a former linguist who grows hydroponic tomatoes; an Apache plumber who reckons his long third fingers mark him as a descendant of Aztec royalty; a volcanologist who wears tweed as a tribute to Shackleton and Scott. Herzog meets them all with his characteristically unflappable inscrutability and intercuts these interviews with the images of unholy and breathtaking beauty that he and co-cameraman Peter Zeitlinger have captured - above and below the ice.

Nothing is romanticised. On the contrary, Herzog gives us a sobering introduction to the grimy banality of McMurdo and a couple of the scientists he interviews show that it's a thin line between not being able to explain what you're doing and being as mad as a snake.

In short, the film offers us no easy escape from the conclusion that a good part of the human activity there is harmful if not gratuitous. In a telling sequence in which his camera explore the downed wreck of an aircraft clumped in snowdrifts we glimpse the potential double meaning of his title.

It's an odd ethnography, drenched in the quizzical misanthropy that is the Herzog trademark, and if its episodic style makes it too restless to be truly enchanting, it's no matter. This is Herzog after all: when he finally, inevitably does turn his attention to penguins, he focuses on a sole male who leaves the group heading for the sea and food and strikes out inland. As his camera lingers on the bird waddling to certain death, we think - as surely he does - of Herzog's previous films Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo.

Director: Werner Herzog
Running time: 99 mins
Rating: Exempt