I was surprised by this film, because I didn’t think it was possible for Werner Herzog to take such ripe material and turn it into such a flawed product. That flaw is a conceit that calls for an ‘alien,’ performed by Brad Dourif (who is pictured in the poster), to whine about astronauts and the human race while Herzog shows a compilation of NASA footage that he obtained. Dourif, delivering some of the worst dialogue of the decade, speaks as if he were performing slam poetry for a day care center for astronauts’ children. While the effort toward infusing a space/underwater documentary with an air of magical realism is appreciated, I don’t know how Herzog didn’t pull the plug on the idea when it was so obviously falling flat. For an idea of the performance, look at the film’s poster, with Dourif glaring at you, and imagine that as he is glaring he whispers, angrily, and with a voice not far from that of Christopher Lambert, “we aliens all suck.” And no, it doesn’t have any camp value.
The film is otherwise well-lensed, and the soundtrack by Mola Sylla is pretty but doesn’t match or enhance the imagery, and makes it feel like a Discovery Channel for Kids program (which, if it were, would explain a lot). This film should have been completely scrapped and skipped in favor of his more mature Encounters at the End of the World. As evidenced in For All Mankind and, to an extent, Picture of Light, well-composed documentation of celestial subjects doesn’t need to be dolled up with phony alien rants in order to have a mysterious and ominous aura. I appreciated the film towards the end for it’s comparisons of the depths of the ocean to deep space as equally foreign spaces, despite one being light years away and the other being right here on our planet, but I was so angry about Dourif’s alien that most of this was immediately dismissed while the credits rolled. Herzog should bend the truth in his non-documentary documentaries all he wants, but he can at least realize when he is treating his audience like ridalin-starved juveniles.