The Wild Blue Yonder (2005)

Critic Reviews

• J. R. Jones, Chicago Reader

  This wacky 'science fiction fantasy' (2005) by Werner Herzog looks like it was made for a few thousand bucks, but it's held aloft by the filmmaker's inexhaustible curiosity and wonder.

• Sid Smith, Chicago Tribune

  The Wild Blue Yonder is at times playful and inventive, at others simplistic and silly. Ultimately, Werner Herzog's free-form, idiosyncratic devolution of the documentary is beautiful but dull.

• Jan Stuart, Newsday

  For devotees of lunatic Herzog adventure a la Fitzcarraldo, it's only a serviceable time-killer 'til the arrival of Rescue Dawn, the director's Americanization of his 1997 documentary, Little Dieter Needs to Fly.

• V.A. Musetto, New York Post

  The Wild Blue Yonder wavers between (sometimes) brilliant and (mostly) boring.

• Elizabeth Weitzman, New York Daily News

  A meandering, amusing trifle, Werner Herzog's latest film is as cheekily flaky as his recent Grizzly Man was sharply down-to-earth.

• Manohla Dargis, New York Times

  An artful mixture of carefully culled and originally produced material, Werner Herzog's a science fiction fantasy purports to tell the story of an alien species.

• Fernando F. Croce, CinePassion

  Raw materials are mingled with staged performance, context is scrambled, all of it is transformative

• Rob Humanick, Projection Booth

  Herzog's use of cinema defies the very fabric of our known world.

• Anthony Quinn, Independent

  Herzog remains a one-off in German cinema - eccentric, infuriating, cherishable - and nothing in this will detract from his legend.

• Derek Malcolm, This is London

  An unlikely combination, but then Herzog never ceases to surprise and here, despite some dull patches, does so with an off-centre film of an almost dreamlike quality.

• Tom Charity, Total Film

  It's a long, strange trip, alternately banal and visionary.

• Phelim O'Neill, Guardian [UK]

  This is just further proof that Herzog can make a film about anything, and indeed, from anything.

• Wendy Ide, Times [UK]

  It's not helped by a watery soundtrack that sounds like chill-out trance played on a nose flute.

• Jamie Russell, Film4

  http://www.channel4.com/film/reviews/film.jsp?id=161810

• Tom Dawson, BBC

  Despite the film's playful humour, there's also a deadly seriousness to The Wild Blue Yonder, for it shows man's insignificance faced with the sheer vastness of nature.

• David Parkinson, Empire Magazine

  Sci-fi nuts, stoners and conspiracy theorists might get a kick out of this. But even Herzog fans will find this mix of found footage and Kinski-lite diatribe as frustrating as it's fascinating.

• Ben Walters, Time Out

  A scientific context is offered by interviews with researchers expounding modes of intergalactic travel, but the real pleasures are in the organic beauty of deep spaces and the ambiguous position of the humans suspended in them.

• Eric Monder, Film Journal International

  Though far from perfect, The Wild Blue Yonder does have something to say about human folly and it makes its statement in an unusual and thought-provoking way.

• Rob Gonsalves, eFilmCritic.com

  I don't know quite what Werner Herzog has been smoking all these decades, but more directors need to be smoking it.

• Jeffrey M. Anderson, Combustible Celluloid

  [A] bizarre, beautiful and slightly tedious amalgamation.

Read all 21 critic reviews