Simply A Masterpiece

A Masterpiece!

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

The music becomes grating and overbearing as does Herzog's voice which is way paste its sell date but he is too in love with his own voice to hear that. What a waste of an opportunity. Get rid of the "scientists". Why are they in the cave getting in the way of filming the subject matter? They have to be there this one hour the are allowed to film? I wanted to experience the paintings with light approximating the moving torches that the cave painters carried. Instead we get all these concentrated bright spots from flashlight like head lamps from all these annoying scientists ruining every shot. i watched this in 2D. Someone should have told Herzog that if he had just properly and sparingly used the lights that he had we could have gotten an adequate sense of the 3 D of the cave walls from the shadows, as the film fleetingly does, if the light had moved consistently with the camera. He needed a real cinematographer with some brains and visualization ability like the cave painters had 30,000 years ago. As is all too typical, even for Victorian era architecture and furnishings, claimed in the name of science or preservation, but really to boost their importance, people with degrees always want to exclude others without the same degree from seeing things they are preserving. Why did the curator need to be there breathing on everything? Was this a condition of permission to film. She could have explained what we were seeing in voice over later and yielded her breathing damage time to the film crew but she wanted her face in the film. I thought having a boom mic operator was a waste too as was stopping the filming for a room tone type audio recording. This seem to be filmed and lit without any imagination or planning as if it was just any ol' location. Obviously the play of darkness and light coming only from moving torches influenced the way the animals were depicted. Even the scientists present, literally, and some in the future could have learned something from this if it had been lit and filmed to reproduce the way it was experienced by the cave painters.I'll take Herzog at his work that filming access may never be granted again and give him 1 star for squandering the privilege and preventing someone more capable from doing it. As a doc filmmaker over 60 I also feel embarrassed at the thought of being associated with him for that. He needs to retire now.

The images of the 30 or 40-thousand-year-old drawings inside the Grotte Chauvet are absolutely stunning, spell-binding, wondrous. If you're the sort of person who is moved and amazed by this kind of thing, then this is truly your kind of thing! What mars the documentary are three elements: 1) an almost total lack of archaeological/anthropological explanation (and I don't count the pony-tailed ex-circus juggler-turned-archaeologist who barely seems to understand Herzog's ridiculous questions and does his best to respond but still ends up sounding like a French Milhouse Van Houten; 2) a musical soundtrack that is grating, repetitive, irritating, over-the-top, inappropriate, and just plain preposterous (flights of celestial choruses drone as the camera pans over the paintings on the cave walls); and 3) Herzog's inane, pretentious, Euro-trash narration, which comes in at about the intellectual level of a thoroughly stoned junior high student. Just wait for the last few minutes when you get to the part about the albino crocodiles and see if you don't hoot with laughter. The Chauvet Cave is extraordinary; Herzog is a farce.

I was so disappointed by this documentary. The subject itself is amazing and I was eagerly looking forward to finding out more about the cave. But this was horrible. There is not much science here or much information about the people that left these paintings. What did they look like? What were their habits? Have similar paintings been found? This documentary should've been half as long given the sparse information provided.Instead, you get Werner Herzog (the writer/director) talking pretentious dribble about spirits and how the scientists supposedly want to leave the cave after a few hours because they feel they're being watched by the original inhabitants. I highly doubt the scientists said that. At one point he tells all the scientists to stop talking so that we can "listen to the sound of the cave" and "maybe hear our own heartbeats". Yeah Werner, why don't we all hold hands and say a prayer too? Anyway, instead of hearing a couple water droplets (if anything), he instead plays grating violin/cello music on the film for two minutes over the top of images from the cave. So much for listening to the silence. Oh and then he inserts a sound effect of a heartbeat *facepalm*.Not only that, but Werner Herzog's film direction is awkward and embarrassing for the people he interviews (he does this in his other documentaries as well). You know that awkward moment after everyone has laughed at a joke and there's a lull in the conversation? Or after someone is done talking to the camera, they get this look on their face like "So are you done filming?" - Well Werner makes sure you see those sorts of moments. Or he'll have his subjects just stare at the camera while holding a photo or something. It's extremely unflattering to the people interviewed.Oh yeah, and he interviews some perfumer (yes, that's right, a guy that makes perfume), and this guy goes around smelling cracks in rocks to see if he can "smell" other parts of the cave. Here I am begging for some genuine science and he's interviewing fruitcakes.Seriously you will wish NOVA, History, or NatGeo got the rights to film this cave instead. A documentary by those groups would've been far more informative.The only reason to watch this is to see images of the cave. There are a few amazing crumbs of science in this film (they do talk about a couple artifacts found), but it's like eating a potato chip when you're starving for a full meal.

Werner Herzog is given special permission by the French authorities to make a video record of the paintings on the walls of Grotto de Chauvet, the earliest of which were determined to be over 30,000 years old. What he makes is a documentary all right, but one about him and his crew making the documentary about the paintings - this is the key to appreciating this film, which would surely anger viewers expecting more hard info about the paintings and the site.I was enchanted by the labyrinthine passages of the cave and the way the paintings emerged out of the ancient and utter darkness cloaking them, even in 2D. The effect must have been really something in 3D. The sight of the light playing on the paintings with black all around touches some memory so distant and deep that it is irretrievable - yet there nonetheless. This is perhaps the source of the unnerving feeling mentioned by more than one of the experts and crew. I would venture to say that it is, indeed, what the film is really about.Herzog introduces us to and interviews experts involved in the study and preservation of the site, and treats them as veritable subjects alongside the paintings per se. They are a motley bunch, each one what used to be called "a character". I found myself thinking that, from now on, the paintings will depend on them and successors like them for their preservation and interpretation - so why not get to know them? Interviews aside, Herzog does all the talking. True, some of his comments are off the wall, but others are thought- provoking. That is Herzog.Most reviewers were put off or mystified by the ending, but it struck this one as apt. The incongruity of white albino crocodiles thriving in a place where they could never exist naturally dovetails nicely with that of Herzog hauling 21st-century cinematic equipment into a cave to meet people dead 30,000+ years ago. What would the artists have made of these intruders, who may have looked just as strange to them? Which of the two match-ups seems more remote or distant? And the area was ice-age cold then; who could tell how the climate would change 30,000 years from now, and due to what technology - or lack thereof? Thirty- thousand years constitute that much of a chasm. The crocs are there for these sorts of perspective.The spare, even austere, music makes fitting accompaniment. Too bad that Florian Fricke and Popul Vuh, who did many of the soundtracks for early Herzog flicks, are no longer with us - this one would have been right up their alley.Not Herzog's fault that there weren't more paintings to shoot, but the movie does go back over the same ones again and again (the final looks - provided sans narration - are the longest and best). But I, for one, never tired of seeing them. They are inspired in the sense of being spirit-works, and his unique movie shows that Herzog understood this very well.