Dalbert Pringle The Wild Blue Yonder (from 2005) has got to be one of the most embarrassingly bad films ever produced by an apparently reputable director, ever - Namely - Werner Herzog (who's been in the film-making business for 40+ years now).On all levels - This modern-day, Sci-Fi clunker was about as amateurish as that of a last-minute assignment recklessly thrown together by some empty-headed, little film-school flunky who's hoping to get at least a D on his project, but will very likely get an F, instead.From its boring, stock-footage images, to its "grate-on-your-nerves" ambiance music, to actor Brad Dourif's cringe-worthy performance as "The Alien" (Ho-hum!) - The Wild Blue Yonder really should have put Herzog right out of business as a movie-maker, as far as I'm concerned.From start to finish - The harder this film tried to convince me that what I was watching on screen was totally intelligent, the more it succeeded in confirming to me the real depth of its utter stupidity.

Cosmoeticadotcom 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.

thebrighteyes Werner Herzog makes some pretty good documentaries, but this fiction pseudo-doc isn't one of his better accomplishments. The Wild Blue Yonder (2005) takes stock footage and real interviews and then intertwines it with a fictional story narrated/discussed by (actor Brad Dourif) an alien from another planet.The story, constructed with this outside footage, is about some journey to and from the Andromeda galaxy, and it really doesn't matter because the story is really boring. Yeah, some of the imagery is really beautiful, and the concept of the film is one of the more original things I've seen... Hell, I wouldn't even know what genre to categorize this in (fictional documentary, I suppose).This, unfortunately, doesn't make up for the sheer dullness of the movie and the agonizingly bad soundtrack. Dourif's poor acting doesn't help things much either.

bertseymour7 I respect Herzog and like how he goes in strange directions, but with that sometimes he wanders down the wrong path, or maybe wrong isn't the word. He sometimes wanders down a boring path. Somehow Herzog got his hands on some space footage and some antarctic underwater footage and thought he could compose that into a sci fi movie.This is of course a visually distinctive journey and a must for all die hard Herzog fans, but I felt it was a bit too strange and far out. Brad Dourif plays an alien on earth who says he sucks at what he does or something along those lines, which is kind of funny.Maybe you have to be in the right atmosphere to enjoy this journey, but if you are only going to see one Herzog film, don't make it this one.