Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Movie Review: Werner Herzog's The Wild Blue Yonder

Wow, was this ever bad.  A bunch of jumbled together footage from STS-34, a made-up fairytale plot line, more jumbled footage from some under-ice dives, some otherworldly orchestration, and Brad Dourif as The Man From Andromeda.  If that seems to make no sense whatsoever, then you are correct.  However the movie makes even less sense.  While it initially seems that it might be from the same band of hacks who brought us travesties such as Prometheus, Herzog's motivation here seem more pure: simple incompetence.

We now interrupt this blog post for two messages to the movie industry at large:
1: Obscure does not equal Profound.
2: If it has no story line, then we do not care.
Thank you.  We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog post.

My advice is do not watch, this is not worth your time.  If you absolutely feel compelled to learn more: Wikipedia article and Rotten Tomatoes reviews.  One star out of four, but only for the pretty pictures and bizarro music.

ps: Usually Herzog puts out a decent movie, so – being stuck at home sick and all – I clicked through to the special features part of the disk, hoping for Werner to blame the whole mess on a bad batch of acid or something.  But no, the man actually admitted that he knew nothing about science fiction beyond watching Kubrick's 2001 (which he thought was very good) and a few episodes of Star Trek (which he graded as terribly silly).  *sigh*  Do not waste your time on this one, people.  And will somebody please hand that poor guy a copy of Double Star or sit him down to watch Contact so that he can see what real science fiction is about.

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