The Wild Blue Yonder: Critic Reviews

An artful mixture of carefully culled and originally produced material, Werner Herzog's a science fiction fantasy purports to tell the story of an alien species.

This is just further proof that Herzog can make a film about anything, and indeed, from anything.

The director calls the film a 'science-fiction fantasy,' but it's really a languid meditation on human impermanence.

Though occasionally striking, the footage doesn't pack the evocative punch Herzog intends, and segments that should be lyrical mind trips only result in overstretched longueurs.

A meandering, amusing trifle, Werner Herzog's latest film is as cheekily flaky as his recent Grizzly Man was sharply down-to-earth.

The Wild Blue Yonder is at times playful and inventive, at others simplistic and silly. Ultimately, Werner Herzog's free-form, idiosyncratic devolution of the documentary is beautiful but dull.

This wacky 'science fiction fantasy' (2005) by Werner Herzog looks like it was made for a few thousand bucks, but it's held aloft by the filmmaker's inexhaustible curiosity and wonder.

Seems primarily designed to amuse and delight auds. However, it also reasserts, in a lowkey way, one of Herzog's favorite themes: The impersonal, irreducible otherness of nature, seen here as crushingly vast and beyond comprehension.

The Wild Blue Yonder wavers between (sometimes) brilliant and (mostly) boring.

Not a major Herzog work or one that will draw a large audience, but a must-see for those who suspect (as I do) that he's one of the greatest talents now working in this medium.

Strangely beautiful.

Raw materials are mingled with staged performance, context is scrambled, all of it is transformative

Herzog's use of cinema defies the very fabric of our known world.

An unlikely combination, but then Herzog never ceases to surprise and here, despite some dull patches, does so with an off-centre film of an almost dreamlike quality.

Sci-fi nuts, stoners and conspiracy theorists might get a kick out of this. But even Herzog fans will find this mix of found footage and Kinski-lite diatribe as frustrating as it's fascinating.

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Despite the film's playful humour, there's also a deadly seriousness to The Wild Blue Yonder, for it shows man's insignificance faced with the sheer vastness of nature.

It's a long, strange trip, alternately banal and visionary.

It's not helped by a watery soundtrack that sounds like chill-out trance played on a nose flute.

Herzog remains a one-off in German cinema - eccentric, infuriating, cherishable - and nothing in this will detract from his legend.

A scientific context is offered by interviews with researchers expounding modes of intergalactic travel, but the real pleasures are in the organic beauty of deep spaces and the ambiguous position of the humans suspended in them.

Though far from perfect, The Wild Blue Yonder does have something to say about human folly and it makes its statement in an unusual and thought-provoking way.

I don't know quite what Werner Herzog has been smoking all these decades, but more directors need to be smoking it.

[A] bizarre, beautiful and slightly tedious amalgamation.