– This is a disappointing precursor to Lessons of Darkness, showing that sometimes more concise treks through barren wasteland are more profound than artfully distant and meandering ones. Fata Morgana is all over the place, sometimes to exhilaratingly so, but more often to my frustration. The opening third (following the mesmerizing prologue consisting of an endless stream of landing airplanes) is King Jamesian nonsense, read aloud by a sterile female voice, the reaches for grandeur that Herzog somewhat ironically utilizes in most of his films, usually from his use of opera, feels pretentious and empty in this segment. The imagery is stunning, but the jerky camera pans through the desolate landscape only became another example of the stilted attempts at poetry.
– The middle segments is more playful, a relief, but Leonard Cohen? His songs are out of time and place here. Herzog takes over in the voiceover department, reading more new-agey material than the previous woman that is an improvement because I now know that Herzog isn’t taking this project as seriously as I thought he was.
– There is a very nice final act. The attention to the ‘band’ is apocalyptically depressing in a very classy way. I can’t remember much from this segment, but I remember being baffled.
– Nothing comes together in Fata Morgana in the psychotic way that Lessons of Darkness does, or in the cynical ‘whatever’ of Herzog’s closing statement in Encounters at the End of the World. It just fizzles in and fizzles out of a point. There are more ideas in the opening plane shots than the entire rest of the film.