Meandering fiction, mesmerizing Brad Dourif

 THE WILD BLUE YONDER (2005)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

If director Werner Herzog had cut down some free-floating sequences of astronauts inside a space shuttle, I would have felt that this quasi-documentary crossed with a fictional storyline was less of an endurance test. Herzog doesn't know when to quit sometimes, when certain scenes are shapeless and go on for an eternity. I am generally very understanding of long takes and short takes, though everything has to feel in tandem with whatever story you are telling. And, yes, that includes a very experimental feature by Herzog, a man prone to going off the deep end in very masterful films from the past such as "Aguirre: The Wrath of God" and his "Nosferatu" remake or "Stroszek." "The Wild Blue Yonder" is not one of them but it should also not be dismissed.

Brad Dourif appears as an alien from the Andromeda system, only in human Dourif form. He talks to a camera a lot about that system and how many light years it is from our galaxy, and how he took a human form and joined the CIA to explain what he knew. The CIA did not listen to him, to which I said to myself, well, did you tell them you were an alien or did they think you were a kook? This is never explained yet this alien persists in telling his story of how aliens have failed, and his species failed in establishing their own government in the U.S. Then we hear his explanations by voice-over as we see footage of the Wright Brothers, I think, and some turn-of-the-century footage while he goes on about how one of his brothers tried to commit suicide. Then we get footage of NASA astronauts as they venture into space to find this system and, alarmingly by way of an actual astrophysicist and his elaborate diagrams, they find gravitational tunnels that lead from one planet to the next. Their discovery of Andromeda, a largely underwater planet which the astronauts hope to colonize, yields amazing sights of all sorts of fish species. When the astronauts return, it is 800 years later and they find the Earth to be a barren planet, you know, the way it was in prehistoric times.

All of these astounding insights delivered by Dourif are fascinating and he is easily the most watchable aspect of "The Wild Blue Yonder." I like the message of having respect for any ecological environment. Unfortunately, director Herzog uses actual footage of astronauts as they are shown weightless in their space shuttle, eating and having a hard time getting in their sleeping pads. This footage goes on and on to the point of tedium, adding nothing of value other than the sight of weightlessness which is not that amazing anymore unless you have never seen similar NASA footage. The underwater footage of this planet is mesmerizing and otherworldly (it is Antarctica substituting for Andromeda). I still felt Herzog cut away too often from Dourif, who is a mesmerizing presence as well. I wanted to see more of him, and who was filming him? Was this recorded footage for posterity? Who can say. "The Wild Blue Yonder" definitely meanders and its far too ample use of NASA footage leaves us out of the loop. Still, I will say this - I've never seen anything like it before.