 |
A
humanoid alien recalls his race's ill-fated attempt to establish a
community on Earth and the Earthlings' subsequent attempt to colonize
his home planet, a liquid orb with a frozen sky.
* * *
Now this is a Werner Herzog movie. Not because of its unusual take on something standard — here, the idea of "alien invasion," except that their invasion is pathetic and just triggers an invasion on our part — but because — wait for it — almost the entire thing is constructed out of found documentary footage.
Herzog shot only a few minutes of material himself, mainly Brad Dourif as The Alien recounting the story of his species' failed trip to Earth and our species' semi-failed trip to planet Blue Yonder. He gives his monologue in desolate, trashed surroundings, framed by the abandoned construction sites and burnt-out trailers that his fellow travelers intended to be the seeds of a parallel United States capitol. He gestures herky-jerkily and squints straight into the camera, suspiciously. Also original to the movie are a series of clips of mathematicians and physicists explaining, geekily, by what sort of gravitational trickery such long-distance space travel might be accomplished.
But the majority of the movie was found, from grainy old footage of mankind's early flights (just like Errol Morris uses!) to onboard documentation of a NASA mission to underwater film of divers, fish, and such. The Earthlings' trip to Blue Yonder is represented by those NASA astronauts floating around in zero-gravity on some space jaunt in the 80s — forgive me, but I'm not a space exploration geek — and their fact-finding mission there is represented by the diving. It sounds hokey, but it works; on one level, I knew I was just watching some real-life astronauts do their thing and that the guys in the SCUBA gear weren't actually the same ones on the space treadmills fifteen minutes earlier, but on another level I bought it.
So thank YHWH for Herzog. Who else would pull a stunt like this? I mean, I wouldn't want a lot of films to be pieced together from documentary footage, but I'm glad someone tried it out. This, in large part, is how a filmmaker ascends to my directorial pantheon: by doing stuff that isn't so much un-clichéd, but that doesn't even acknowledge the existence of the standard.
Comments