Mark Reviews Movies: FIREBALL: VISITORS FROM DARKER WORLDS

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | November 12, 2020

Werner Herzog, that unstoppable filmmaker and adventurer, has explored and documented so much of the known and forgotten world, but with Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds, he and co-director Clive Oppenheimer set their eyes toward the heavens. It's another globe-trotting documentary from Herzog, but his primary interest this time is objects from space. Specifically, we're talking about meteorites, which have crashed to the planet, offering visions of the beauty of the unknown universe and the very real possibility of mass destruction for Earth.

Herzog's attitude toward the beauty is pretty straightforward. His beliefs about the destruction part are a bit more complicated. It's fascinating to see the filmmaker adjust the tone of his film on the spot during his running narration.

We'll get a hint or the suggestion of some cataclysm from the past, such as the massive space rock that wiped out the dinosaurs and countless other lifeforms on the planet, or the potential for another such disaster in the future. Herzog, eccentric and multifaceted thinker that he is, will take the moment to recall artistic presentations of such realities and possibilities.

For the dinosaurs, he shows a clip from a computer-animated movie about their extinction, telling us how much he loves certain details. A group of lumbering dinosaurs wander some vast plain, and the movie's own narrator explains how unaware they are of what the blinding light in the sky is. Their eyeballs, the narrator proposes, were scorched from the heat. They couldn't see fiery death approaching, but they certainly could feel it.

The animation is pretty cheap, but one doesn't believe for a second that Herzog "loves" this for some kind of kitsch factor. Maybe it's the burning eyeballs.

As for the potential for future destruction, Herzog recalls the 1998 film Deep Impact. One expects just about anything from a Herzog film, but even so, it's difficult to imagine anyone anticipating the filmmaker proclaiming his admiration of the "beauty" of that film's climactic sequence, in which pieces of a destroyed comet wreak absolute chaos from the United States' east coast inward. "Beauty" probably isn't even the word the makers of that film had in mind, but hey, at least he's not talking about the other movie from that same year about a space object threatening the planet.

This is probably starting to sound like rambling, but how else can one approach a film by Herzog? He kind of rambles, too, but in such a way that's completely focused and uniquely unexpected in its depth.

That's the case again here, as Herzog and Oppenheimer travel from university collections of recovered meteorites to the makeshift facilities of hobbyist researches of space rocks, from a giant crater in Australia to the "godforsaken" location of the impact spot of the asteroid that wiped out three-quarters of species on the planet 66 million years ago, and from an observatory/warning system in Hawaii to the frozen but moving glaciers of Antarctica. We really do need to start referring to the 78-year-old Herzog as an adventurer, in addition to his other titles.

He's behind the camera and offering for his voice for most of the film. Oppenheimer, a geoscientist specializing in volcanoes who has collaborated with Herzog twice previously, takes on the on-camera interview duties. There are two primary focuses here: the space rocks, in terms of what they can tell us about the universe and how one might alter life on this planet as has happened in the past, and the people who study them.

It's clear the filmmakers are almost as intrigued by the people as they are the objects from space. In addition to the more "official" scientists, whose passion is obvious and infectious (Herzog interrupts one, saying the man could talk for eight hours and never get boring, in order to keep things going), we meet a few "unofficial" ones, such as a jazz musician who started looking for space dust on the tallest roof he could find and his research partner, who appears on camera dressed as Wyatt Earp. Herzog marvels at the sincere, joyous reaction of a scientist in Antarctica, who, after hearing about meteorites being prevalent on the continent, finds one himself. He falls over, sobbing in pure ecstasy. Oppenheimer gets a taste of that, when he finds one himself.

As for the samples of meteorite, Herzog and Oppenheimer simply let us take in the beautiful varieties of shape, color, patterns, and formation. They know they have gold—not to mention grays and blues and purples and a whole spectrum of natural colors that are literally otherworldly—here. The filmmakers revel in showing these samples to us, and we sit in awe of what secrets they might hold. It's little wonder that humans throughout history, seeing shooting stars in the sky, saw meteorites as divine signs or portents of fate (There's some discussion of this, too). If only they could have seen what those rocks contained within, what glorious or terrible tidings might they have imagined?

There's the flip side—the terrible tidings—to all of this. Something is coming. We might be alive to see. It might be our descendants of unknown generations to see it, or no human being will be alive to witness that destruction, arriving as a flaming rock from outer space. Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds offers some hope in the fact that we're as prepared as we can be for such an event. By the end of this film, though, we might also have a better understanding of Herzog's view of cataclysmic destruction from a space object: It will be devastating—but what a horrifying, beautiful show it will be.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products