With the wild success of the Discovery Channel’s award-winning Planet Earth series, any documentarian who wants to capture nature has issues working for and against him. First, due to people’s increased interest in sweeping landscapes and seeing animals in their most pristine conditions, there’s now a built-in audience. On the other hand, because Planet Earth’s footage is so striking, it becomes a challenge for other filmmakers to offer anything new or comparably compelling.

Yet the majesty and power of Antarctica, both above the ice and below (and no matter how often put to screen) is still breathtakingly fascinating. German filmmaker Werner Herzog—whose previous documentary, Grizzly Man, delved into the quirky personality of a man dangerously obsessed with nature—again focuses on the push and pull between nature and humanity in Encounters.

Herzog, with one cameraman, headed to Antarctica under a scientific grant, and jokes as he narrates that he warned those footing the bill that this would not be another film about penguins. Rather, he wanted to answer questions of human nature: what drives people to come to this frigid and desolate continent and what will their discoveries uncover?

While the permanent “camp” at McMurdo Station is considered a U.S. outpost, all of the people Herzog introduces us to are ex-pats of sorts—extreme travelers who have searched the world over, not finding a home and having nowhere left to go but to the end of the earth. They are philosophers, bankers, and techies who come here and become forklift drivers and greenhouse tenders… all in search of that elusive Something.

Herzog does a skilled job of juxtaposing the humans and the nature they’ve come to observe. He jump cuts from long drifting shots underwater—where the camera almost floats like algae through the cold sea, watching creatures from the deep that look as if they are off the pages of futuristic science fiction films—to the drab and cluttered labs of people studying particles of sea dirt. The stark contrast points to Herzog’s bias.

While the majority of the film looks at the stories of the people who have come here, Herzog seems to have a deep disdain for anything human-made, and indeed the humans themselves. His narration cuts people’s stories off saying things like “this story goes on forever,” and seems to poke fun at a man descended from Aztec royalty. He dares to ask a scientist who has just discovered three new paramecium species, “So this is an important moment for you?”  It’s as if he not only disrespects the researcher’s work, but also his audience’s intelligence; do we really need to be told this is a big deal?

He loathes the “camp” he must stay at, calling it a “dirty mining town”—and yes, it is ugly—yet if he were out to make a film about natural Antarctica, why does he spend so much time following these “loathsome” humans around?  These are quirky people, to be sure; but Herzog’s narration puts him squarely outside of that pool, as if he is the only one that really respects the earth, the only one there with pure motives. Unfortunately his attitude makes some of the film, and what it hoped to do, off-putting.

But no manner of bad narration and impolite observations can take away from the beauty of the sea, the ice, and the non-human animals who inhabit it. As much as he wanted to avoid penguins, there is a touching story of a wayward male who heads the wrong direction. There are the cute and stoic seals, who patiently allow themselves to be studied and whose calling voices under the ice have an unearthly sound.

The vastness of God and the smallness of humans is emphasized by the soundtrack of religious-sounding chorales, set over the shots of ice cathedrals and gigantic jellyfish. There is a deep sense of the holy present in the film, but not a holiness that is personal. Rather it is untouchable… and we pesky humans are just a blip in the story, soon to be eradicated and swallowed up by this hallowed ground.

Encounters at the End of the Earth is rated G.  This film would probably bore young children; but there is certainly nothing violent (even amongst the animals), and just a brief discussion of potentially sexually deviant penguins (turns out they’re not as exciting as Herzog hoped).

Courtesy of a local publicist, Jennie attended a press screening of Encounters at the End of the Earth.