ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD

WRITTEN, DIRECTED & NARRATED
BY WERNER HERZOG

“Few filmmakers make the end of days seem as HAUNTINGLY BEAUTIFUL as Werner Herzog does, or as inexorable… CALL IT PLANET HERZOG. Ethereally lovely images. ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD has the quality of a dream: it’s at once vivid and vague, easy to grasp and somehow beyond reach…. I could watch these surreal creatures for hours… But there are other sights and sounds to marvel at… One of the beauties (of the film) is that all the furry and floating animals are no more wondrous than the bipeds tramping through and around McMurdo.”
– Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

“An expedition, alternately COMIC AND VISIONARY, to the heart of coldness.”
– J. Hoberman, Village Voice

“Not only a jaundiced spin on nature travelogues but an oddly revealing distillation of his career-long nexus of obsessions. His genre is the head trip, his worship of nature quasi-pagan, his chosen kin the adventurer elite…”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker

"Grade: A. RIVETING! Herzog is at his peak."
– Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

“Alternates between SPELLBINDING views of the landscape’s white and blue expanses, conversations with scientists, and interviews with McMurdo’s denizens. Runs the gamut from existential meditation to comedy; indeed, it is perhaps HERZOG'S FUNNIEST FILM. In one scene, the director tries to make a reputedly increasingly misanthropic and shy scientist relax by asking him probing questions about sexual deviancy among penguins. The bemused expert ventures that, while he know of no gay sex, there is some evidence of threesomes and ‘prostitution.’ Some penguins, it turns out, become insane and abandon their group… ENCOUNTERS takes up many of the same motifs (as Al Gore’s AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH), albeit in a more imaginative way.”
– Sven Lütticken, ArtForum

“The film’s visuals are A WONDER TO BEHOLD.
STUNNING footage (of) a violent, hermetic world under the ice, populated by myriad strange life-forms.”
– Film Comment

“(The film) has a loose, episodic flow, punctuated…by the director’s own wry voiceover and his unerring eye for strangeness and eccentricity. Herzog transforms the STRANGE AND WONDROUS sights and sounds of Antarctica into the landscape of an alien planet. (It) offers ONE ARRESTING VISUAL MARVEL AFTER ANOTHER and should render contrite all who say there is nothing left for movies to show us that we haven’t seen before.”
– Scott Foundas, Variety

“An elliptical meditation on landscape… ENCOUNTERS evinces a smoothness, a confidence in its technological mastery that is almost HYPNOTIC. The underwater footage… provides some of the film’s most indelible images. Herzog works throughout the film to join the dangerous and the lovely. A portrait of people in search of the sublime.”
– Jerry White, Cinema Scope

"Herzog takes Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom and gives it existential balls."
- Mike Plante, Filmmaker

WERNER HERZOG TRAVELS TO ANTARCTICA’S McMURDO STATION, a community of 100 — and, as one critic notes, it’s like the earth was turned upside down and all the weirdoes fell to the bottom. While Herzog warned the National Science Foundation who sent him that he wouldn’t be making another film about fluffy penguins, he can’t resist asking penguin expert Dr. David Ainley if there is insanity or homosexuality among the birds. The answer: no gay penguins, but there are threesomes and even prostitution, and yes, they do get “disoriented” at times. The filmmaker’s idiosyncratic humor, intelligence and curiosity posit the magnificence and profound mysteries of nature against the equally unknowable phenomenon of human beings who choose to live and work in this remotest of glacial landscapes.

USA • 2008 • 99 MINUTES • IN ENGLISH • THINKFILM • RATED G