While legendary documentarian Werner Herzog’s latest film, Encounters at the End of the World, uncovers life in Antarctica, it is quick to point out exactly what it isn’t: March of the Penguins. In fact, those cute, fluffy penguins only appear in Encounters at the End of the World for about five minutes, yielding most of the screen time to the Herzog’s real interest – the human.
It may come as a disappointment to some that a filmmaker would journey all the way to the South Pole and come back with a movie about people, but these are no ordinary people. Like most of the thousand inhabitants of McMurdo Station, the largest American research center in Antarctica, Herzog is on a quest. His is to understand human nature – our need to conquer and inhabit every frontier – by examining the kind of person that would choose to live their life in such isolation at where Herzog dubs "the end of the world."
What he finds there among the scientists and heavy machinery drivers is a smattering of drifters and dreamers, societal misfits cut off from the rest of world whose common thread is a desire to "jump off the map." Those familiar with Herzog’s last film, Grizzly Man, will find a striking similarity between McMurdo’s inhabitants and Grizzly Man’s doomed protagonist Timothy Treadwell, who preferred life with wild Alaskan bears to human society. Clearly Herzog has an affinity for these "professional dreamers."
With a bare-bones film crew, including only himself and his camera-man, Herzog evidently went to Antarctica not knowing what he would find, the result of which is a film that veers in a few different directions, much like a conversation that’s ending bears no resemblance to its beginning. It’s part nature documentary and part social commentary, with hypnotic visuals of the aquatic world below a six-foot-thick sheet of ice, set to hauntingly ominous choral chant, intertwined with Herzog’s trademark cynicism and humorously blunt narration.
No film about "the unknown continent" would be complete without a warning about the perilous future of the environment, but Encounters at the End of the World’s brief caution is followed by Herzog’s reprimanding of environmentalists who struggle to salvage endangered species at the expense of a dying human culture.
Another of the movie’s preoccupations is the obsession of many to hold a place in the Guinness Book of World Records, to be made famous as the first to do something, regardless of what that something is. Beginning with British explorer Ernest Shackleton’s original expeditions to Antarctica in the early 1900s, Herzog questions the motives of exploration for the sole purpose of gaining notoriety. It begins to beg the obvious question: why can’t we as humans allow anything to remain unknown? Must we conquer every frontier?
While the exploration of Antarctica was originally called "the end of adventure," it seems unlikely that humans will ever quell their desire for locales on which to put footprints. Herzog poignantly likens Antarctica to the moon and McMurdo’s dismal mining-town feel to what future space stations would presumably be like.
Perhaps the film’s lack of a single cohesive theme could be considered one of its flaws, but it remains fascinating and entertaining nonetheless. It would be hard to say Herzog really answers the ambitious questions about human nature he poses at the beginning of the film, but I doubt he expected to. It’s not necessarily a failure that he was unable to solve his thesis. In fact most documentaries don’t. The difference is that Herzog is bold enough to state his thesis at the beginning of the film, and Encounters at the End of the World is no less engaging for it.
Encounters at the End of the World is an enlightening look at the life in Antarctica that most people haven’t the slightest clue about, and an engrossing study of the disillusioned idealists who inhabit that world in solitude, seeking refuge from society like fish who crawl out of the sea to, as one of the film’s scientists asserts, "escape the horrors of the deep."
