Werner Herzog
The Wild Blue Yonder

This here is neither a science fiction film nor a documentary with scientific content or a mockumentary. 'The Wild Blue Yonder' (2005) is indeed a true mystical work, a kind of spiritual journey that we embark on with director Werner Herzog who literally takes us by the hand and leads us on a journey to destinations seemingly far beyond our solar system and beyond any threshold so far crossed by our technology, millions of light years away from Earth, only to discover in the end that the unknown deep space he refers to is our soul. Our individual one and at the same time the one collective and shared by the entire human species.

A visionary and conceptually ambitious cinematic work (the third of an ideal trilogy that began in 1971 with 'Fata Morgana' and continued in 1992 with 'Lektionen in Finsternis'), awarded at the Venice Film Festival in 2005 where ambition means succeeding perfectly in the expression of one's thought in a punctual and precise manner, and as intelligent as few other things you will ever have the opportunity to see on a screen, and which the German director skillfully constructs with a series of artistic choices inspired by a certain minimalism and perhaps metaphorical, symbolic but where everything in any case is not random or dictated by that chaos and those imperfections that then involve every creative process, because here Herzog shows us things for what they really are and even if a scene is shot in the waters of the Antarctic Sea instead of the Andromeda galaxy, this is not a trick or cinematic device but a precise and sensitive choice with strong expressive content. The scene is shot under the ice of the South Pole (the footage was produced by Henry Kaiser on Ross Island), he knows it very well and so do we who are watching the film, and yet the emotional result is the same as finding oneself moving in a state of suspension in the rarefied atmosphere of another planet far from Earth.

The story, because this documentary tells a story, is told to us by the only actor in the film, the great Brad Dourif (the one from my profile picture here on Deb), who in this documentary plays the part of an alien with human traits who comes from that far unknown deep space. His planet has an atmosphere of liquid helium and on which everything is dying due to a catastrophic ice age that struck his planet. He, like all the other inhabitants of his planet and belonging to his species, left the Andromeda galaxy aboard a spaceship and after much wandering, like others, eventually arrived on Earth. Great intentions accompanied this new experience of his and that of his companions, driving them to build a city that would have been their 'capital', a project that proved to be a failure and which in the end would literally become what could well be described literally as a cathedral in the desert. The alien speaks directly in front of the camera from there, and everything surrounding him is practically deserted and a heap of abandoned dust and waste. He is the only one on the scene and in a long monologue tells the story of his species, explaining to us how it had already in the past come into contact with the planet Earth, contributing significantly to scientific development, and then recounting the evolution of human space flight from its conception and then from the fifties-sixties to the future time.

This last passage is narrated through the assistance and use of audio-visual documentation owned by NASA. This applies both to images taken from space and to the scientific contributions of mathematicians Roger Diehl, Ted Sweeter, Martin Lo.

Meanwhile, we follow through archive footage the dynamics of the Space Shuttle STS-34 journey, which in 1989 indeed had the task of launching the Galileo probe and which here ideally continues its journey in space in search of other habitable worlds by exploiting modern technologies presented by scientists in their talks. A journey into unknown space and a universe where evidently nothing is random, because the Shuttle and its crew (astronauts Donald Edward Williams, Ellen Baker, Franklin Chang-Diaz, Shannon Lucid, Michael McCulley) eventually arrive in the unknown deep space from where the alien comes.

The planet is still completely frozen, and the sky is completely icy, a sign that the crisis that hit it was irreversible, but we are explained how the human species intends to proceed with the colonization of the planet with technologies close to what is believed will be used in the near (perhaps) future on Mars, considering the rest - as is common thinking within the scientific community - the expansion in space not only as a great scientific achievement but also something essential for the continuation of human life.

In the end, after fifteen years from its departure, while on Earth instead, 820 years have passed due to space-time distortions, the Space Shuttle and its crew finally return home. But planet Earth has completely changed: human civilization has practically destroyed itself and the species has virtually regressed to Stone Age levels, and nature has prevailed over its artificial works, reclaiming what was taken from it.

And here, teetering between a completely desertified landscape and heaps of waste and this vigorous revenge of nature, at the cost of every remaining trace of development and secular persistence of human civilization that the alien Brad Dourif appears in this scene as the last sentient being left all this time on planet Earth, where he has watched over, keeper of the historical, cultural, and scientific heritage of two species, in complete solitude and feeling melancholy for his past and at a certain point even envying the Space Shuttle expedition which he himself recounted and because it had reached his planet with the intention of colonizing it despite the persistence of the ice age that had led to its abandonment. But this only before realizing himself first, laden with infinite and millennial sadness, that that light years distant journey was, from the beginning, inevitably destined to end where everything had begun.

End credits. At this point, we close our eyes and imagine being in no time and in no place, and we cling desperately to ourselves, seeking that human warmth that only contact with our fellow beings can give us.