Encounters at the End of the World

I see all of Werner Herzog’s documentaries eventually (from Grizzly Man to the most obscure), but I was surprised to see this turning up on some “best of the year” lists while the Netflix disk was already sitting on top of my tv. Werner always takes us to farflung places to watch man confront nature, and here he takes us to Antarctica, the south pole where one of the film’s subjects says every untethered person in the world eventually slips. You do have to be a little strange to get a kick out of scuba diving beneath the ice in search of new organisms, penetrating glaciers or volcanoes, rhapsodizing about seals or whatever object of study has brought you to the nether end of the world. Herzog’s seemingly random observations always do add up to something, at least in the labyrinth of his own mind, but I did not follow the thread in this as well as others. So to me it was just an amalgam of odd characters and striking photography, especially underwater, which was what interested Herzog in the first place. He embarks with a promise not to put any “fluffy penguins” in his Antarctica film, but winds up finding a completely Herzogian penguin, who treks off from all the others, headed for distant mountains and certain death, a tiny dot in a frozen immensity. (2008, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-80.)