The Wild Blue Yonder (2005)

Werner Herzog is one of those intriguing name brand directors whom I suspect is really best known for the sheer outrageousness of his projects – whether it’s hauling a real ship up a real mountain ( Fitzcarraldo.  Really) or filming a movie while all the actors are under hypnosis (Heart of Glass).

Recently, however, he’s given up on drama and made a number of documentaries where the boundary between fiction and documentary is thoroughly blurred.

In The Wild Blue Yonder he took this a step further and put together a SF epic cobbled together from footage from a NASA shuttle mission and of scuba divers under the arctic ice, as well as interviews with scientists about the future of space travel.

The glue that holds it all together is the presence of the reliably weird Brad Dourif (what would SF cinema – particularly the cheap end of the spectrum – have done without him?).  He plays an alien, telling us about the destruction of his own planet and recounting our mission to his dead world.

It’s a fascinating conceit.  The NASA and arctic footage is stunning (although it is interesting to compare the hair of the Astronauts in flight with that of the characters in The Martian.  Oh, well.  Just don’t expect Hollywood to show someone with messy hair), the conceptual claims of finding easy routes for space travel, maybe at speeds faster than light, are fascinating, and, let’s face it, Brad Douriff’s impassioned narration is worth the price of admission alone.

Ultimately, though, I’d say it was a near-miss.  But a fascinating and thoroughly watchable near-miss unlike anything anyone else would have thought of doing.