''The Wild Blue Yonder'' is a 2005 science fiction fantasy film by German director

Werner Herzog Werner Herzog (; born 5 September 1942) is a German film director, screenwriter, author, actor, and opera director, regarded as a pioneer of New German Cinema. His films often feature ambitious protagonists with impossible dreams, people with u ...

. It was presented at the 62nd

Venice Film Festival The Venice Film Festival or Venice International Film Festival ( it, Mostra Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica della Biennale di Venezia, "International Exhibition of Cinematographic Art of the Venice Biennale") is an annual film festival h ...

, where it won the FIPRESCI Award. It was screened in competition at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival and the

Sitges Film Festival The Sitges Film Festival ( ca, Festival Internacional de Cinema Fantàstic de Catalunya, links=no) is an annual film festival held in Sitges, Spain, specialized in fantasy and horror film Horror is a film genre that seeks to elicit fear ...

, winning the "Carnet Jove – Special Mention" award at the latter. Most of the film consists of recontextualized documentary footage which is overlaid with fictional (sometimes

fantastic The fantastic (french: le fantastique) is a subgenre of literary works characterized by the ambiguous presentation of seemingly supernatural forces. Bulgarian-French structuralist literary critic Tzvetan Todorov originated the concept, characte ...

al) narration. This technique was used in Herzog's earlier film ''

Lessons of Darkness ''Lessons of Darkness'' (german: link=no, Lektionen in Finsternis) is a 1992 film directed by Werner Herzog. Shot in documentary style on 16-millimetre film from the perspective of an almost alien observer, the film is an exploration of the rava ...

'' (1992). The film's name comes from the first line of the song " The U.S. Air Force". The scenes in space are courtesy of

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research. NASA was established in 1958, succeedi ...

Plot

The film is about an

extraterrestrial Extraterrestrial refers to any object or being beyond ( extra-) the planet Earth ( terrestrial). It is derived from the Latin words ''extra'' ("outside", "outwards") and ''terrestris'' ("earthly", "of or relating to the Earth"). It may be abbrevia ...

(played by

Brad Dourif Bradford Claude Dourif (; born March 18, 1950) is an American actor. He was nominated for an Oscar, and won a Golden Globe and a BAFTA Award for his film debut role as Billy Bibbit in ''One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'' (1975). He is also k ...

) who came to Earth several decades ago from a water planet (The Wild Blue Yonder) after it experienced an

ice age An ice age is a long period of reduction in the temperature of Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers. Earth's climate alternates between ice ages and gre ...

. His narration reveals that his race has tried through the years to form a community on our planet, without any success. The alien also tells the story of a space mission he found out about through his job with the

CIA The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, ...

. In the late 1990s, debris from the Roswell UFO crash was unearthed and examined. Scientists incorrectly believed that they had contracted an infectious alien disease from the debris. An exploratory mission was launched to Blue Yonder (represented using archive footage from the STS-34 Space Shuttle mission and Henry Kaiser's diving expedition in

Antarctica Antarctica () is Earth's southernmost and least-populated continent. Situated almost entirely south of the Antarctic Circle and surrounded by the Southern Ocean, it contains the geographic South Pole. Antarctica is the fifth-largest co ...

) to explore the possibility of establishing a new, uninfected human colony on the planet. After finding Blue Yonder suitable for human habitation, the

astronaut An astronaut (from the Ancient Greek (), meaning 'star', and (), meaning 'sailor') is a person trained, equipped, and deployed by a human spaceflight program to serve as a commander or crew member aboard a spacecraft. Although generally r ...

s returned home 820 years later, only to discover that Earth had been abandoned in their absence.

Soundtrack

Trivia

According to the DVD extras, the interview with the alien is filmed in Niland, CA, and nearby Slab City, CA.

References

External links

* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Wild Blue Yonder, The German avant-garde and experimental films 2005 films Films shot in Antarctica English-language German films German science fiction films 2000s avant-garde and experimental films 2000s English-language films 2000s German films