When documentaries go wrong. This is a recent (Oct. 2016) effort by acclaimed filmmaker Werner Herzog, so I was primed for something good. It's supposedly about some of the active volcanoes around the world -- did you know there are only three in the world with caldrons where you can look down and see magma? -- and the cultures that live around them.
Unfortunately, it's more about the cultures than the volcanoes. While there is some seriously jaw-dropping footage of eruptions and magma flows, that's only about ten minutes of the film. Herzog spends a half hour explaining and documenting the bush people that live on some remote Pacific island, and about 45 minutes looking at (and generally fawning over) North Korea and its extinct volcano. Some footage of modern day Iceland, and archive footage of the eruptions there a few years ago. About 45 long minutes documenting a very boring archaeologist dig in Kenya, the site of... of... was it an ancient volcano, or plate tectonics? I forget now. Anyway, it didn't seem to have any relation, AT ALL, to the purported subject of the film. I almost aborted my watching.
Jesus, even famous filmmakers need editors.
Home 