''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 un ...

. 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 he ...

, where it won the

FIPRESCI Award The International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI, short for Fédération Internationale de la PRESse CInématographique) is an association of national organizations of professional film critics and film journalists from around the world fo ...

. It was screened in competition at the

Mar del Plata International Film Festival The Mar del Plata International Film Festival ( es, Festival Internacional de Cine de Mar del Plata) is an international film festival that takes place every November in the city of Mar del Plata, Argentina. It is the only competitive feature fest ...

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 films, of which it is considered one of the world's foremost in ...

, 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 rav ...

'' (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, succeeding t ...

Plot

The film is about an extraterrestrial (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 kn ...

) who came to Earth several decades ago from a

water planet Water Planet is a Polish television channel owned by Polcast Television Polcast Television is a TV broadcaster of four Poland, Polish channels: Tele 5 (Poland), Tele 5, Polonia 1, Water Planet and Novela TV. It was founded in 2006 when Finca ...

(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 gree ...

. 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 intelligence agency, foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gat ...

. In the late 1990s, debris from the

Roswell UFO crash The Roswell incident was an event that occurred in 1947, pertaining to the recovery of mundane metallic and rubber debris from a military balloon that crashed near Corona, New Mexico by United States Army Air Forces officers from Roswell Army ...

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 Stock footage, and similarly, archive footage, library pictures, and file footage is film or video footage that can be used again in other films. Stock footage is beneficial to filmmakers as it saves shooting new material. A single piece of stock ...

from the STS-34 Space Shuttle mission and

Henry Kaiser Henry John Kaiser (May 9, 1882 – August 24, 1967) was an American industrialist who became known as the father of modern American shipbuilding. Prior to World War II, Kaiser was involved in the construction industry; his company was one of ...

'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 contine ...

) 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 Slab City, also called The Slabs, is an unincorporated, off-the-grid alternative lifestyle community consisting largely of snowbirds in the Salton Trough area of the Sonoran Desert, in Imperial County, California. It took its name from concrete s ...

, 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