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It's the end of the world as we know it

Accompanied just by a solitary cameraman, acclaimed director Werner Herzog paid a visit to the McMurdo research station in Antarctica. If you have ever seen a Herzog documentary you know going in that it's pretty difficult to guess where he is going to take you. While you can hopefully figure out that it's a trip to Antarctica, you can't know how this bleak wilderness will be viewed through the eyes and brain of a man who, to put it mildly, has a reputation as an eccentric. "Encounters at the End of the World" is, as he says, "not another penguin film".

What Herzog strives for, and succeeds at, is to display the odd collection of 1000 men and women who inhabit McMurdo. Through interviewing them we learn that this is a group with little in common with each other on many levels. What they do share is intellect (for the most part), a spirit of adventure, a sense of loneliness that comes from not feeling like they fit in anywhere else and their own particular peculiarities. Some knew they were scientists as soon as they could have conscience thought. Others have come from such diverse experiences as banking and the Peace Corps.

Rather than showing us a place of breathtaking beauty, Herzog gives us McMurdo as a physical blight on the landscape. It is as bleak as any construction site you have ever seen, and it is no different inside. Their living quarters are identical to a cheap motel.

All who visit McMurdo must take a two day survival course before they can be allowed to go off on their own because it is easy to become disoriented in blinding snowstorms. One of their tasks is to build a shelter and spend the night in it. It doesn't look like an easy task. Once Herzog and his cameraman have their shackles removed, their wanderings take them all over the compound and to other remote outposts run by scientists conducting tests in their field of expertise. Herzog is there because he is friends with one of the divers stationed there. When the cameraman accompanies the diver under 6 feet of solid ice it all takes on the feel of a nature documentary, at least for a short while. During these scenes, Herzog plays music with a religious feel to complement what he calls the cathedral appearance of the underwater world. Perhaps the most compelling piece of nature footage involves listening to the sounds of seals below the ice you walk upon. A scientist describes it as sounding like Pink Floyd. It reminded me of the eerie sounds of a Theremin. It is haunting.

Herzog's attitude towards the people there is puzzling. Big shock, eh? On one hand he certainly admires them but he also makes fun of them by asking them obnoxious questions and editing it by adding his derisive comments over their speaking. The latter part of "Encounters at the End of the World" presents a very dark view of what we are doing there and where we are headed as a society. He questions why people explore and he maintains that it is not a result of man's need to make things better. It is a self-glory hunt by those who need that. To accentuate this point, he films a man in America whose goal is to set a Guinness Book record in Antarctica so he can brag that he has a record on every continent.

Herzog is conflicted about what he sees in Antarctica. However, one senses that Herzog could be conflicted by watching a cloud float by. He is not an easy man to peg. What we do know about him is that he brings a unique voice to everything he touches and that he is the ultimate professional. What more could an audience ask for?