Expansive, repetitious and sometimes mind-numbingly dull, "Fata Morgana" is not for all tastes nor will it be for all Werner Herzog devotees. An experimental film dealing with Mayan-creation myths coupled with the vastness of the Sahara Desert could have worked but I find Herzog doesn't have the knack to know when to quit. There are flashes of brilliance though.
Separated in three sections accordingly, the first is "Creation," the second is "Paradise" and the third is "The Golden Age." Peculiarity doesn't begin to this describe this visual odyssey of desert landscape, some of it quite breathtaking. However, I could have lived without the narration by Lotte Eisner (a German film critic and Herzog's mentor) to bring forth what was initially a science-fiction story that looks mostly like a travelogue of the Sahara and other parts of Africa. There are shots of mutilated animals, half-eaten remains of camels, kids dragging small dogs with a rope leash and posing for the camera or pointing to the sand by the beach, half-finished construction sites, sea turtles, hungry lizards, and many mirages of vehicles and buses and people in the horizon.
The "Creation" episode is soporific without enough spatial desert scenes beyond endless tracking shots. In fact, this section starts with planes landing in an airfield, one after another until they become "mirages." Once we get past this major lull, "Paradise" and "The Golden Age" become far more engaging because we see the inhabitants of this arid region amidst broken down cargo planes and cars. The narration carries on and most of it is not analogous to the images, perhaps purposefully so (“In Paradise, you quarrel with strangers to avoid making friends.”). A brothel stage with a man humming a tune wearing goggles while the madam is at the piano feels like something out of a David Lynch film (no context is provided for this scene, which is only something I came across in my research. For all I knew, this could have been some musical act at a ramshackle bar).
I wish Herzog let the images speak for themselves rather than choosing a religious context but one has to remember that he shot what he could for a different kind of film and chose another avenue. I have no idea what any of it means (and I much prefer Godfrey Reggio's "Koyaanisqatsi") and, though it can be a tough slog to get through its 79 minutes, I still found it sort of semi-alluring.
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