[D66] Nieuwe docu Werner Herzog

[R.O.]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4X9fQsiAOQ

Critic’s Pick


  ‘Fireball: Visitors From Darker Worlds’ Review: It’s Raining Mysteries


Apocalyptic comets, complicated math, ancient rituals, eccentric 
scientists: Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer’s new documentary has it 
all.


Glenn Kenny

By Glenn Kenny

  * Nov. 12, 2020

Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds
    NYT Critic's Pick
    Directed by Werner Herzog, Clive Oppenheimer
    Documentary
    1h 37m

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This picture, “Fireball: Visitors From Darker Worlds,” is the third 
Werner Herzog movie to come out in 2020. Yes, he directed it alongside 
Clive Oppenheimer, but still. At age 78, Herzog’s productivity almost 
recalls that of his long-gone colleague and compatriot Rainer Werner 
Fassbinder, who had more feature films to his name than years lived when 
he died in 1982 at age 37.

Herzog has to be at least reasonably good at self-care to maintain not 
just his filmmaking pace but his globe-trotting. Like his most recent 
release, “Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin,” this movie was shot 
around the world, including the Torres Strait Islands, Castel Gandolfo 
in Italy, Antarctica, Arizona and Hawaii. But it’s his intellectual 
curiosity and emotional availability that make his movies sing. This 
film rests on the fact that Mother Earth is always being called on by 
other worlds in the forms of comets, meteorites and asteroids — and it’s 
about as transportive as documentaries get.

Oppenheimer is a volcanologist from the University of Cambridge who 
first appeared in Herzog’s “Encounters at the End of the World,” a 
spectacular Antarctica trip, in 2007. He was later in Herzog’s “Into the 
Inferno,” in 2016, about, well, volcanoes. Cataclysmic fire has a 
special place in Herzog’s filmography; his remarkable “Lessons of 
Darkness” (1992) treated the burning oil fields of Kuwait, set ablaze by 
Saddam Hussein, as an apocalyptic sci-fi scenario.

“Fireball” looks at fire coming from the sky. But it begins very much on 
the ground, in Mérida, Mexico, at a celebration of the Day of the Dead. 
Men with painted faces perform what Herzog describes as a “fireball 
ritual,” derived from ancient Mayan culture; it “feels like a 
re-enactment,” he says. The site where they dance is one where an 
asteroid changed the topography millions of years ago.

Oppenheimer is the onscreen interviewer and explainer for much of the 
movie. He shows places where meteorites affected both landscape and 
culture. In the city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, for instance, a black 
stone embedded in the Kaaba, the cube at the center of Islam’s holiest 
mosque, is the subject of adulation; it is believed that the stone fell 
from paradise to show Adam and Eve where to build a shrine, according to 
Muslim tradition. Similarly, in Ensisheim, a commune in the Alsace 
region of France, a meteorite that landed in 1492 was seen as “an email 
from God,” Oppenheimer says.

The movie introduces us to fascinating people — among them a jazz 
musician turned geological scientist and his research collaborator, who 
survived cancer four times and dresses like Wyatt Earp. It also teems 
with beautiful visuals illustrating mind-boggling mathematical concepts. 
“It gets so complicated now, we are not going to torture you with 
details,” Herzog drolly notes at one point.

And “Fireball” makes two very credible statements. One: that, hippie 
rhetoric notwithstanding, you and I really are made of stardust. And 
two: that a world-changing (as in probably obliterating) dark-world 
visitor is sooner or later going to come this planet’s way. The 
equanimity with which Herzog and Oppenheimer’s movie frames that 
certainty is strangely comforting.

*Fireball: Visitors From Darker Worlds*
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+.


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        Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds

NYT Critic's Pick
Find Tickets

When you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through 
our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

Directors
    Werner Herzog, Clive Oppenheimer
Writer
    Werner Herzog
Stars
    Werner Herzog, Jan Braly Kihle, Jon Larsen, Clive Oppenheimer
Running Time
    1h 37m
Genre
    Documentary

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