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The introductory Pascal quote regarding the "grandiose splendor" of humanity's collapse is counterfeit, but the visions Werner Herzog finds to illustrate it are absolute. The apocalypse is unmistakable even if the disbanding Gulf War goes unnamed, the 13-part structure posits Ecclesiastes in the desert (cf. Fata Morgana) from the vantage point of some of the most sublime aerial shots ever captured. Kuwait City at dawn, "The War" (CNN views in grainy night vision), "afterwards everything was different." Space-engulfing camera sprawls mourn and exalt the wreckage: Craters, bones, gnarled pipelines stretched by the lenses. And oil. "The oil is treacherous, because it reflects the sky. The oil is trying to disguise itself as water." Other surfaces are just as deceiving—flat-roofed hangars resemble Aztec pyramids, a crumbled refinery tank suggests a battered ship protruding from the sand. There's no irony to the chapter names, "Torture Chambers" are precisely that, the kind of instruments that made Falconetti's Joan faint. "Satan's National Park," "A Dinosaur's Feast," "The Drying Up of the Wells." Wagner for creation and devastation (Das Rheingold, Götterdämmerung), the dynamiting of a gush turned column of fire, a flabbergasting shot borrowed by Anderson for There Will Be Blood. Speech breaks down in the face of horrors, the witnesses (a bereft mother, a brutalized boy) can only communicate with their unforgettable visages. By comparison, American firefighters remain an interchangeable mass, just mustaches behind doused visors until one of them sees the camera and smiles like Nanook. What planet is this? In the flaming wells, forever being extinguished and relit, Herzog finds the ideal embodiment of human madness, aliens in their own world, perpetually unleashing, warring, reviving foes. "I am so weary of sighing, O Lord, grant that the night cometh." Cinematography by Rainer Klausmann.
--- Fernando F. Croce |