To me, this movie is perfection.

Great Film overall

Absolutely Fantastic

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

I just watched Werner Herzog's 2005 science fiction fantasy film The Wild Blue Yonder, and am left in that rare position of not having much to say of the film that could really change the opinion of a viewer, pro or con, toward it. This is not because it is good nor bad, simply because it is one of those works of art that is not even on a good/bad scale. It is beyond such reckoning, a purely aural and visual experience for most of its 81 minutes, and thus has an effect similar to the phantasmagoric end of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.The narrative, however slight, is this: the alien (Dourif) comes to earth some decades ago, in a Third Wave of colonizers, before the supposed 1947 Roswell UFO crash, because his home planet entered an Ice Age. Upon landing, they attempted to establish their own version of Washington, D.C. out in the California desert, thus justifying Dourif's rants out in a ghost town. Their failure leads him to the conclusion that all aliens suck- a point he repeatedly hammers home. It also lets him go on about how mankind has ecologically ravaged the earth. He speaks of his CIA involvement, and more found footage, of the Jovian Galileo mission, allows him to hypothesize on the Roswell matter. Then he claims that the aliens brought with them microbial diseases. NASA launches a space mission to find inhabitable planets, but none are found in the Milky Way, until, via silly mathematics, a gateway to the Andromeda galaxy is found- one even the aliens did not know of. As the earth is getting more and more uninhabitable humans, who shortcutted their way to the alien Andromedan world, decide to explore it. Cue the Antarctic ice footage, meant to portray the frozen atmosphere and liquid helium ocean of The Wild Blue Yonder. While intensely beautiful and hypnotically mixed with the oral sounds of a bunch of Sardinian singers and an African singer, the film becomes really indescribable- but not in that good nor bad way. You just have to watch, whether you like or dislike it. When it's done, we see that the humans have returned to earth, aged only 15 years (comparisons of the archival footage vs. that Herzog shot for interviews) while the earth went through 820 years, and reverted to a wild state. Humans left the earth, and now treat it as a planetary game preserve. In the audio commentary, Herzog reveals that shots of the high green plateau that ends the film were from Venezuela, part of the leftover footage from his earlier film The White Diamond.This film will doubtlessly bore many people, and it will turn off still others for a plenum of possible reasons, and in no way, shape, nor form, is this a masterpiece on par with the best in Herzog's oeuvre. But, even if one views it in the worst way, and calls it a daring failure, it is a film worth watching again. One day soon, I will.

"I've never been certain whether the moral of the Icarus story should only be, as generally accepted, 'don't try to fly too high', or whether it might also be thought of as, 'forget the wax and feathers and do a better job on the wings'." – Stanley Kubrick"We sit here stranded, though we're all doing our best to deny it." – Bob DylanIn hindsight, it makes sense that Warner Herzog would increasingly gravitate toward science fiction. The German director has always styled himself as a romantic adventurer, conquering mountains, jungles and deserts with compass and camera. With Earth explored he then moved toward documentaries, in which he typically followed explorers, astronauts, pilots and scientists, all of whom shared his longing for further expanding man's frontiers.Ironically, the impossibility of this expansion is what two of Herzog's later documentaries, "Encounters at the End of the World" and "The Wild Blue Yonder", are covertly about. The latter film consists of recontextualized documentary footage - taken largely from NASA space missions - which is spliced together with an extended monologue by actor Brad Dourif. Dourif plays a cranky extraterrestrial, and his monologue offers a thinly disguised story about the rise and fall of the human Empire.So here we have the tale of a species who evolves outward from a water planet, survives an ice age, and then develops language. This acquisition of language becomes man's tragedy, barring him from his "natural state", tearing him from the contentment of a prelapsarian existence, and trapping him in a never-ending race to latch on to the imaginary, unattainable wholeness of desire. On and on man thus travels, repeatedly forming communities, and watching as they all rise and fall. The species then stagnates for a while, becoming filthy, all consuming pigs, before catching the disease of "hope and innovation" from the great men of yesterday. Man then takes to the stars, before quickly finding himself lost in space. Space is too vast and all is chaos, he mourns, realisations which cause the species to stall yet again. Trapped in a postmodern funk, man repeats history over and over again, until he learns not to resist chaos but to see its shapes and patterns, be responsive to its wild undulations and harness its untamed cosmic highways. Onwards humanity now surges, conquering new territories and planets, building new futures beneath its feet and then...erects a intergalactic shopping mall. All this for nothing, Herzog sighs. Dourif's cranky alien throws up his hands in despair. Back home, Earth has become a museum; a testimony, pristine and majestic, to both a grandeur and divinity our species hopes to capture and hold within itself."The Wild Blue Yonder" has been marketed as a documentary, but like most of Herzog's supposed "documentaries", it's a wholly fictional film, concerned with themes which Herzog has mulled over throughout his career. It's the weakest of Herzog's later science fiction "documentaries", but interesting enough for its wild, improvisational style. Herzog appropriates material from everywhere, co-opting stock footage, images and interviews, distorting everything he gets his hands on for his own madcap purposes.8/10 – Worth one viewing. See "Encounters at the End of the World" and "The White Diamond".

I am a huge fan of Werner Herzog. I think he is truly an amazing and inspirational filmmaker and I will never hesitate to watch one of his movies. This one intrigued me because it was so different from his other features. Sadly it was a bit of a let down, but not completely. I wouldn't recommend this film to many people (very few actually). It's so out there and different that I can't put my finger on exactly what it is. It's part documentary, part science fiction, and part Discovery Channel. Most of the footage is from NASA space stations or under the ice in Antarctica. There was strange music and very little narrating. It was a bit much and could have been cut down to increase the effect of the footage. I liked some of the ideas tossed out there like aliens who were not very intelligent (although they managed to travel to Earth millions of light-years away). The film was a bit confused as to where it wanted to go and what it wanted to be. A solid effort by Herzog and very original. I was interested throughout and even now I want to go back and take a peak. Maybe someday, but not right now.

What the? This astoundingly painful patchwork of filched free footage, oddball tribal music and an old dude with a ponytail portraying an exotic alien from Andromeda (which, by the way, is a galaxy with 100 billion stars, not an ice bound planet with jellyfish), has been greeted with mega gushes from smitten Herzog fans who diligently seek meaning where there is none. As the title of this review would suggest, I, and a very few others it seems, can see the old boy's bum.The plot has been recounted many times in these reviews, so I will just hit the lowlights. Earthlings and Andromedans (perhaps they should call us Milky Wayans) switch planets because of mutually uninhabitable conditions at home. Doesn't sound too bad yet. Wait. The Earth people apparently make the two and one half million light year trip in a small earth orbiter from the late eighties utilizing an exotic technology announced by a smart looking guy standing in an orange grove. The uninhabitable nature of Earth is difficult to discern because of the traffic filled interstates in the background of one of the Andromedan's soliloquies.Environmental consciousness abounds - for instance, film is preserved by using the same wistful shot of the alien but using different voice-overs on at least two occasions. Set expense is minimized by using a trailer junkyard and a ... something with columns perched on dirt. Script pages were saved by having insufferable lengths of time showing five or six people (the Earth contingent, I presume) floating in the space capsule and the same amounts of time consumed by other scenes of scuba divers and jellyfish. The musical score is a sort of eerie wailing which I contend was recorded by holding a microphone over the audience at the premier.Hunter Thompson might have liked this picture, providing he was properly medicated. I didn't. If you want to see space journeys made in unlikely conveyances, I recommend The American Astronaut in which yokels from Oklahoma travel in space in a barn.