Wild Blue Yonder, The
Entry updated 3 June 2024. Tagged: Film.
Film (2005). Wener Herzog Filmproduktion, Tetramedia, West Park Pictures. Written and directed by Wener Herzog (1942- ). Cast includes Brad Dourif. 81 minutes. Colour.
An unnamed Alien (Dourif) from the titular water planet arrives on Earth, seemingly one of many refugees from his dying world, though he is the only one we see and he does not seem to know the whereabouts of any of the others. The aliens attempt to set up a capital and commercial centre in the rural US, but the project is a failure as no one visits or shops there. Meanwhile the US government is examining debris from the Roswell UFO crash, which in the film was a probe from Blue Yonder. Believing that an alien virus may be released from the remains, a manned mission to Blue Yonder is mounted to explore the possibility of establishing a colony there (see Colonization of Other Worlds), in case human life on Earth is threatened. After the laying the groundwork for human habitation, the astronauts return to Earth after 15 years away, due to relativity arriving 820 years in Earth's future, to find it has been abandoned by humanity and exists as a pristine nature reserve.
Apart from the scenes of the alien speaking direct to camera in front of his ruined capital, almost all of this remarkable film is made up of existing documentary footage. The arrival of the aliens on Earth is wittily depicted using silent newsreels of early aviators. The bulk of the film consists of footage from a NASA space shuttle mission from 1989 (for the journey to Blue Yonder) and of underwater photography from the Antarctic (for the planet itself), with intermittent voiceover from the alien. These scenes, and the final shots of an uninhabited Earth, are given a truly mythic, otherworldly quality by the soundtrack by Ernst Reijsiger, which utilizes cello, Senegalese singer Mola Sylla, and a Sardinian vocal group. The other major component of the film is a series of interviews with real-life scientists and mathematicians, on the pragmatics of space travel (see Space Flight), the possibility of using Wormholes to travel to distant Star systems, and what human colonization of space may look like (one suggests that the ideal would be giant floating shopping malls). The major theme in the films of Herzog, a leading figure in the New German Cinema of the 1970s onwards, is the impotence or insignificance of humanity in the face of nature or an overwhelming and indifferent universe, expressed so often and so distinctively that it has led to jokes in The Simpsons and the Marvel animation What If?, among others. This is the only film in which he gives this theme an explicitly sf setting. [CWa]
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