alonewiththemoon | Aliens suck

Last night I watched the Werner Herzog movie The Wild Blue Yonder, which was one of the most beautiful yet existentially depressing movies I have ever seen. It's the parallel stories of an alien from a planet he calls the Wild Blue Yonder, an underwater world filled with strange creatures, now living on Earth and not living up to our expectations of what aliens are and of a group of astronauts sent into space to try to find a habitable planet for humanity now that it has ruined Earth. Just a teeny tiny global warming message there. The alien's homeworld was created with footage shot under the ice in Antarctica by the musician Henry Kaiser, and it truly looks like an alien world. The astronaut footage was found footage from NASA, which was then elaborated upon with the collaboration of actual NASA astronauts, mathematicians, physicists, etc. Herzog thanks NASA at the end of the film for its sense of poetry, and it strikes me as a wonderful thing that those individuals would want to be involved in his movie and that NASA would allow it. Even though much of the movie is not footage shot by Herzog, it was handled like very classic Herzog filmwork, reminding me most of Fata Morgana with its long, long shots of little movements in large landscapes. And in fact in the bonus interview with Herzog, he says this film reminded him of Fata Morgana, so apparently I know my Herzog stuff. While watching the film I wasn't sure that I would rate it among his best, but in retrospect, maybe I would. He really did pull together an amazing film out of various sources, with very little disjointedness. Brad Dourif was entirely convincing as a bitter landlocked alien as well. It should go without saying that the astronauts were very convincing as astronauts, but it's worth mentioning that things like their obvious lack of muscle tone while floating out there in space made the narrative that much more effective.