Highly Overrated But Still Good

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Werner Herzog, as usual (considering the three Werner Herzog documentaries I have seen so far), narrates this one and he begins when the dream of the man of flying was only that, a dream. Now in Dr. Graham Dorrington we have a modern aeronautical engineer with a dream. Dorrington had in himself the dream of flying since long time ago, since he was a kid that stuff was in his mind and since then he knew the consequences. In the new "mission" of Dorrington Herzog was there…The film has like three sides; we watch the professional side with Dorrington and his team of course (and the people from Guyana) planning and checking every single detail of the airship and with Herzog himself. We watch a personal side of Dorrington with that chapter in his past and with the tragic thing that happened during a similar "mission" like 10 years before so right now like 14 years ago. And we watch the side of the film that has in the place and people the protagonists. Herzog and his team were there to capture the work of Dorrington but is obvious that once there they filmed some more fascinating material. Dorrington had one clear objective, to make work his new invention in that unexplored place, in Guyana. There were complications and we knew what was in Dorrington's mind every time he felt something was going to be wrong. And everything is about film-making; Herzog was filming a man who wanted to fly and film. And everything is about those brave filmmakers, a team filming impressive footage knowing that if the worst happens their way can be until there. Eventually the White Diamond flew and that image is nothing but just another of the many beautiful images that the film present to us. Apart of that we watch the interesting and touching story but not only the one of Dorrington. It is an encounter of different worlds, exactly as Dorrington said they were the ones with the professional knowledge and with the technology however nothing is comparable to the knowledge of a man like Marc Anthony Yhap who's home is that place. The White Diamond is a beautiful film and it is just another interesting and worth watching work from Herzog.

This is a lyrical film more than anything. Herzog refuses to classify his documentaries as "documentaries" which I respect. Truthfully this isn't a straight forward documentary even if it does follow one man's quest to get his air ship to float above Guyana.Herzog is an observer more than anything and we see that in how his documentary is assembled, he does not force anything and he will leave his camera on people for longer than you would expect so that they will feel compelled to say something else.A random man will come up and start talking and Herzog will focus on him for several minutes. This film goes alongside Herzog's other films that represent men with near impossible dreams.

This documentary is filled with beautiful scenery and some delightful music, and lots of tedious technical information about the history of airships, but it ultimately fails because of a lack of focus; Herzog just couldn't seem to decide on the subject of his documentary. With the opening footage we're led to believe it's about airships, but then we're taken to the laboratory of Dr Dorrington who gives us an animated, and technically interesting, description of his wind tunnel and the effects of boundary layers on laminar air flow over airships. At the end of the laboratory tour we hear Herzog's voice somewhere off stage asking Dr Dorrington to tell us about what happened to his hand. We see the hand, missing two fingers, and then Dorrington begins to tell us about his youth and his interest in rockets and how he could have lost his life but instead lost the two fingers. And then we're transported to South America. Well, we eventually get to see the beautiful scenery in the rain forest and we hear about the ghosts of Dorrington's past but we never understand just what it was that's been documented here. It could have been shortened by 30 minutes and made into an interesting film. But it's definitely worth sitting through to see the (all too brief) footage of the Cliff Dance, accompanied by Sric Spitzer's and Lisa Stern's beautiful music, as well as their second song played over the end credits. But the film as a whole just doesn't work.

I am a huge Werner Herzog fan. His early films filled me with a wonderful sense of what movies could do and so hooked me at a young age on the most powerful of all drugs, celluloid.More than his fiction films I am a fan of Herzog's documentaries. There is something about the way he sees a subject that opens your eyes to things other than the subject at hand. Often his documentaries are almost something else, his Lessons in the Darkness about the oil well fires in Kuwait is structured as an aliens arrival on earth. Its a haunting film that is more magical and informative than the similar IMAX film Fires of Kuwait.The White Diamond, is on the face of it the story of the building of an airship to study the canopy of the rain forests. It is also, as Werner Herzog tells it, the story of the search for absolution for the death of the inventors friend. I will certainly buy the first part, but I highly doubt the second.This is simply one of the most beautiful films I've ever seen. The shots of the balloon in flight, the waterfall, the birds that live by the falls and the life in the canopy make this the first time I ever wanted to own the biggest and best TV ever made just so I could see these images. I doubt that other than on a rare occasion you'll ever have seen anything as beautiful.Herzog also introduces us to some real characters Dr Dorrington, the inventor of the airship is a man of great passion. Mark Anthony Yhap, a man hired to help porter materials is probably worthy a film himself. Also the rest of the crew are also intriguing characters for the brief period they cross the screen. It is the mix of people and image that make this film work as well as it does.The trouble is that the film almost doesn't work. As a narrative the film is sloppy and unfocused. We are told about the cave behind the falls where the birds live and where no one has ever gone.We see a camera lowered down to a climber so footage inside the cave can be shot, only to be told we will not be shown the footage. It is only sometime later that we are told why, what is in the cave is a legend and to reveal whats there could up set the belief of the population. Its an odd way round the subject and feels completely backwards. The real trouble with the film is the way Herzog hammers away at Dorrington about the death of a friend some years earlier when a ship he had made got caught up in the trees. Dorrington was in no way responsible for the accident of the death (other than he built the ship that was involved) but Herzog trumpets the point over and over in order to give some dramatic tension to what appeared to be a pretty straight forward test flight of the airship. It adds a false note that almost sinks the film...from which it recovers from when ever we see the ship in flight or get away from the morbid subject.Definitely worth seeing. Its a flawed masterpiece that's a must in High Definition or on a really good TV.