By John DeFore

Over the last few years, moviegoers may have come to expect that any documentary pairing scientists and ice caps will be a scare-fest or a sermon — a big-screen effort to hammer home the urgent need to take action countering climate change.

Not so with Encounters at the End of the World, a film that’s drawing glowing reviews as it expands into theaters across the country. Yes, the movie has things to say about the environment — in at least one instance, it even suggests that humankind’s days here are numbered — but it is far from strident, superficially issue-driven, or even political.

Coming as it does from the idiosyncratic Werner Herzog, that’s not surprising. The veteran filmmaker is far more interested in the interaction of nature and human nature, particularly as it applies to individuals: The guitar-playing microbiologist who became an expert scuba diver to study single-cell marine organisms; the over-educated misfits who “fell to the bottom of the map” at Antarctica’s McMurdo research outpost, where they study the behavior of nearly unimaginably large masses of ice and of the animals (including, yes, penguins) who live on them.

Herzog happily loses himself in the wild as much as he can, capturing haunting images both of “nature” on its own (undersea footage, say, that looks like visions of another world) and of mysterious human/Earth interactions (as when Antarctic newcomers train to survive blinding snowstorms). But slipped in among the quirky portrait-pieces are environmental insights, some of which are poetic: One researcher describes bits of breakaway glacial ice, poignantly, as messages being sent by the continent to the rest of the world.

Nothing here will send moviegoers scurrying home in fear while the credits roll. Rather, the movie encourages the kind of rumination that transcends single-issue behavior and has the potential to tweak, however slightly, viewers’ overall attitudes about their place in the world.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media