The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

The first must-see film of the year.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Werner Herzog is a living legend in my opinion and this film explains why. He is willing to go to the edge of the world to find meaning and purpose- and he finds them in people, geographical objects and even penguins. Herzog goes to a base camp in Antarctica to learn about the inhabitants and why they are there. We learn about the kind of people and the kind of mindset they possess. But this isn't just a point and shoot interview. Featuring gorgeous but humbling vistas of the ice sheets and barren white land there is a poetic quality to the work. A scene featuring a lone penguin walking to its impending doom reeks of existentialist pain. This is a fantastic documentary by the amazing Werner Herzog.

A Werner Herzog film is fascinating regardless of the subject and Encounters is no exception. Featuring great shots of Antarctica, much like every Herzog film this one touches you in ways you cannot really express. (Great Herzog film)

Herzog is one of few I trust to snap my eye open with just an image, he's done it a few times by this point. When he won't, he will still intrigue, invite me to swims unknown. He has powerful intuitions, will venture where the ground trembles with disorder and once there is spontaneous enough to let it climb up through the soles of the feet.It's a German kind of duende that colors his world; the urge or passion a singer cannot quite put to words and responds to with song. I may disagree with him on conclusions of that duende about the cosmos and the futility of endeavor, but I trust him as explorer and soul.He's in Antarctica here, another desolate landscape outside of maps that beckons in a most primal way. It's where Scotts and Shackletons wrecked themselves, and why. He enters as as anyone else might these days; by plane, one more sleepy traveler among dozens. If you know a bit about him, you will observe a few things.He is pleased to find McMurdo base looking like a drab construction site with machinery tearing up the ground, confirming his views of a fundamentally wretched humanity that fouls the earth. He is as pleased to find a forklift operator on the scene who very poetically describes his presence there as a desire to fall off the edge of the world. It's why Herzog has been in most places.He is enormously pleased to find that all Antarctica newcomers must be drilled on white-out conditions by wearing buckets on their heads and stumbling after each other while tethered to a rope. You can almost feel his exhilaration when they have to reach a certain point in this state but find themselves in a jumble in the opposite direction.He includes a tidbit about researchers studying seals, extracting milk from the mothers while claiming they want to be able to study the animals in their natural state. It mirrors Herzog's own endeavor of perturbing to extract truth about it. He tickles us with these researchers; the milk is being collected for studies on weight-loss.He has the researchers lay down with their ear pressed to the ice, harking for calls of seals from below that sound like Pink Floyd (which are artificially edited on top of the scene). There is a whole world down there that ebbs and calls. It's the world Herzog has sought to portray.An oceanologist had previously explained that the Antarctica - standing for a broader cosmos - is not a big, inert slab of ice as thought in Shackleton's time but an organic entity that is rippling out change. He mentions icebergs the size of Texas that will one day head north, saying this with a mad glint in the eye.He finds an entry into that world below via divers. He gives us fluorescent jellyfish undulating in eerie blue silence. This world is constant struggle, one of the divers confirms. The link is made to a precarious humanity, perched on the outer layer of unfriendly chaos, this time via sci-fi movies.So far we haven't had ecstatic truth of the kind which he favors. He finds it in a disoriented penguin that heads inland towards certain death all by himself. I have still only described parts, there is more to see. It points altogether to a certain cosmology.Yes, he has constructed on the way, intruded upon the subject, made it a point to include the bits we have while omitting others. You can imagine that he has sifted through a lot of otherwise unexciting footage. He has staged most of what you'll see. You can tell how well he has (or not) by noting that he first encountered the lone, intrepid penguin and then went back to set it up by filming the exchange where he asks the penguin researcher about insanity among penguins. It couldn't have taken place the other way.I would disagree in parts, or with the temerity of the physicist who explains on camera about neutrinos as coming from another dimension. It's up to us anyway to choose how to perceive ourselves and our struggle, the universe neither cares nor doesn't. It simply provides the building blocks and vistas. But he's a trusted explorer with good intuitions and here's why. This isn't the natural world of Koyannisqatsi, fundamentally pure and being imbalanced by us. Herzog finds a world with disorder and transience built right in, and welcomes the fact. He's more spiritual than he would admit.

As Herzog says at the very beginning of the film, "Encounters at the end of the world" is not another movie about penguins. Rather, it is a visually stunning story about weird and wonderful people living at the end of the world (i.e. at the Antarctica's McMurdo station), as well as about humankind's relationship to the nature. My husband and I immediately got sucked into the life of the biggest permanent US settlement on the South Pole, the peculiarities of its inhabitants, and the magic of the Antarctic ice, its breathtaking landscapes and soundscapes.The best thing about the movie is Herzog's apparent affection towards people who dedicated their lives to adventure, dreams, and pursuit of knowledge regardless of personal comfort. Herzog represented people from McMurdo with warmth and generosity, skillfully illuminating their hidden depths and lovable weirdness in just a few minutes.Another great thing is that the muddy streets of McMurdo, caterpillars, and lonesome outposts create the impression of how life in the Wild West could have looked like – as well as how a future human settlement on Moon may be organized.Additionally, Herzog's voice, in English with a distinct German accent, is pure joy to listen to.After seeing the film, you will probably want to visit the Antarctica (perhaps the only place on Earth where philosophers ride forklifts with pleasure), or at least to go and watch the film again.