Encounters at the End of the World (2007)
Average Rating: 7.6/10
Reviews Counted: 109
Fresh: 102 | Rotten: 7
Encounters at the End of the World offers a poignant study of the human psyche amid haunting landscapes.
Average Rating: 8.1/10
Critic Reviews: 28
Fresh: 28 | Rotten: 0
Encounters at the End of the World offers a poignant study of the human psyche amid haunting landscapes.
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Werner Herzog, director of such acclaimed documentaries as Grizzly Man and Little Dieter Needs to Fly, offers his unique perspective on the South Pole in this film profiling the Antarctic community of McMurdo Station. Located on Ross Island, McMurdo Station is the headquarters of the National Science Foundation. Whether offering a detailed study of the unique survival training regimen that newcomers to McMurdo are obligated to endure or pondering the majestic beauty of a landscape where the
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All Critics (111) | Top Critics (28) | Fresh (104) | Rotten (7) | DVD (7)
Seemingly off-hand, cumulatively imposing, utterly masterful.
Top CriticHerzog is one of a kind. His new doc is an event you watch in awe as you marvel at its wonders.
The sky is relentlessly blue, the sun bright even in the thick of night. In this odd and unforgettable place, Herzog has made his own poetry.
[Herzog is] a filmmaker ideally suited to recognize and celebrate...deep irony.
A poem of oddness and beauty. Herzog is like no other filmmaker, and to return to him is to be welcomed into a world vastly larger and more peculiar than the one around us. The underwater photography alone would make a film, but there is so much more.
A contrarian spiritual journey as provocative as it is hypnotic, Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World literally treks to planet's end.
Damnably frustrating and fascinating, Herzog's questions deconstruct Earth's DNA in a scientific process going beyond statistics to ancestry or spirituality - an idea that we're witnesses and valets who are here and, sooner than we think, will be gone.
Respect for the environment is not a moral issue for Herzog, but a common sense issue of survival. In the harsh environs of the polar regions, his point is made with crystalline clarity.
The footage is breathtaking. We also are privileged to watch seals feeding their young, but the revelations about penguin 'prostitutes' are perhaps the film's most extraordinary. Gay penguins? Insane penguins?
The package is nothing short of exhaustive, especially when you consider this is not a mainstream Hollywood film.
Caustically enchanting
...May not have the shock and drive of Grizzly Man, but it's a poignant and even haunting work nonetheless
This documentary about life in and around a vast scientific research centre in Antarctica. None of these meetings, however, is as interesting as the interspersed footage of the pole's natural wonders.
His best film for years.
This Oscar-nominated gem reveals far more than the traditional documentary by coming at the subject from an unexpected angle to reveal a myriad of unvarnished truths.
Too loose and aimless to sit with Herzog's best, Encounters drifts along on its filmmaker's frostbitten humour and his ever-searching eye for weirdness and wonder.
Herzog is baffled, amused and fascinated by them all, exults in their palpable strangeness, draws us deep into their unique world and, via Henry Kaiser's extraordinary underwater photography, what looms often unnervingly beneath it.
Nature at its most mysterious, brutal and implacable - just as Herzog likes it.
As a nature doc alone, Encounters at the End of the World would stand as one of the year's best. But it is the people who choose to live and work at the very ends of the Earth that are Herzog's real subject.
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Latest News on Encounters at the End of the World
February 16, 2009:
Werner Herzog Looks BackWerner Herzog has a reputation for populating his documentaries with larger-than-life personalities,...
March 13, 2008:
Werner Herzog Taking Audiences on Antarctic AdventuresThroughout his career, Werner Herzog has shown a fascination with protagonists in impossible...
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Foreign Titles
- Encuentros en el fin del mundo (ES)
Killer beauty movie.