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The Wild Blue Yonder | |
---|---|
Directed by | Werner Herzog |
Written by | Werner Herzog |
Produced by | Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, Tetramedia, West Park Pictures |
Starring | Brad Dourif as the alien Martin Lo Roger Diehl Ted Sweetser Donald E. Williams Ellen S. Baker Franklin Chang-Diaz Shannon Lucid Michael J. McCulley |
Cinematography | Henry Kaiser Tanja Koop Klaus Scheurich |
Edited by | Joe Bini |
Music by | Ernst Reijseger Mola Sylla |
Distributed by | Fandango (Italy) Werner Herzog Filmproduktion |
Release date |
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Running time | 81 minutes |
Countries | United Kingdom France Germany |
Language | English |
The Wild Blue Yonder is a 2005 science fiction fantasy film by German director Werner Herzog. [1] It was presented at the 62nd Venice Film Festival, where it won the FIPRESCI Award. [2] It was screened in competition at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival and the Sitges Film Festival, 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 fantastical) narration. This technique was used in Herzog's earlier film Lessons of Darkness (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. According to the DVD extras, the interview with the alien is filmed in Niland, CA, and nearby Slab City, CA.
The film is about an extraterrestrial (played by Brad Dourif) who came to Earth several decades ago from a water planet (The Wild Blue Yonder) after it experienced an ice age. [1] 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. 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) [1] [3] to explore the possibility of establishing a new, uninfected human colony on the planet. After finding Blue Yonder suitable for human habitation, the astronauts returned home 820 years later, only to discover that Earth had been abandoned in their absence.
Werner Herzog is a German filmmaker, actor, opera director, and author. Regarded as a pioneer of New German Cinema, his films often feature ambitious protagonists with impossible dreams, people with unusual talents in obscure fields, or individuals in conflict with nature. His style involves avoiding storyboards, emphasizing improvisation, and placing his cast and crew into real situations mirroring those in the film they are working on.
STS-34 was a NASA Space Shuttle mission using Atlantis. It was the 31st shuttle mission overall, and the fifth flight for Atlantis. STS-34 launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on October 18, 1989, and landed at Edwards Air Force Base, California, on October 23, 1989. During the mission, the Jupiter-bound Galileo probe was deployed into space.
Planetes is a Japanese hard science fiction manga written and illustrated by Makoto Yukimura. It was serialized in Kodansha's seinen manga magazine Morning between January 1999 to January 2004, with its chapters collected into four tankōbon volumes. It was adapted into a 26-episode anime television series by Sunrise, which was broadcast on NHK from October 2003 through April 2004. The story revolves around the crew of a space debris collection craft in the year 2075.
Lessons of Darkness is a 1992 documentary film directed by Werner Herzog. The film is an exploration of the ravaged oil fields of post-Gulf War Kuwait, decontextualized and characterized in such a way as to emphasize the terrain's cataclysmic strangeness. An effective companion to his earlier film Fata Morgana, Herzog again perceives the desert as a landscape with its voice.
Martin Wen-Yu Lo is an American mathematician who currently works as a spacecraft trajectory expert currently working at the NASA-owned Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Martin Lo is well known for discovering the Interplanetary Superhighway, also known as the Interplanetary Transport Network. The superhighway is created by combined gravitational forces of several planets that connects planets by a network of “tunnels” and is the most efficient way to navigate the solar system. This continues to be his main area of research.
The 62nd annual Venice International Film Festival opened on 31 August 2005 with Tsui Hark's Seven Swords and closed on 10 September 2005 with a screening of Peter Ho-sun Chan's musical Perhaps Love. The lineups were announced by the festival director Marco Müller on 28 July 2005 in Rome. The digital films competed in all categories for the first time of the festival history.
For All Mankind is a 1989 documentary film made of original footage from NASA's Apollo program, which successfully prepared and landed the first humans on the Moon from 1968 to 1972. It was directed by Al Reinert, with music by Brian Eno. The film, consisting of footage from Apollo 7 through Apollo 17, was assembled to depict what seems like a single trip to the Moon, highlighting the beauty and otherworldliness of the images by only using audio from the interviews Reinert conducted with Apollo crew members.
Fata Morgana is a 1971 film by Werner Herzog, shot in 1968 and 1969, which captures mirages in the Sahara and Sahel deserts. Herzog also wrote the narration by Lotte H. Eisner, which recounts the Mayan creation myth, the Popol Vuh.
The International Federation of Film Critics is an association of national organizations of professional film critics and film journalists from around the world for "the promotion and development of film culture and for the safeguarding of professional interests." It was founded in June 1930 in Brussels, Belgium. It has members in more than 50 countries worldwide.
Ramin Bahrani is an Iranian-American director and screenwriter. Film critic Roger Ebert ranked Bahrani's Chop Shop (2007) as the sixth-best film of the 2000s, calling him "the new director of the decade". Bahrani was the recipient of the 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship. Bahrani is a professor of film directing at his alma mater, the Columbia University School of the Arts.
Encounters at the End of the World is a 2007 American documentary film by Werner Herzog about Antarctica and the people who choose to spend time there. It was released in North America on June 11, 2008, and distributed by ThinkFilm. At the 81st Academy Awards, the film was nominated for Best Documentary Feature.
The Meerkats, also known as Meerkats: The Movie, is a feature-length 2008 British wildlife fiction film which anthropomorphises the daily struggles of a clan of meerkats in the Kalahari Desert. It was produced by BBC Films, and filmed by the award-winning BBC Natural History Unit. It is the debut directorial feature of James Honeyborne, previously a producer of natural history programmes for television. The worldwide premiere was held at the Dinard Film Festival, France in October 2008, expanding to a wide release the following week. The film was released in 2009, on 7 August in the UK. This was dedicated to actor Paul Newman, the narrator of the film, who died in 2008, shortly before this movie was released making it his final film role.
Nahanni is a 1962 short documentary from the National Film Board of Canada directed by Donald Wilder.
Ben Rivers is an artist and experimental filmmaker based in London, England. His work has been screened at film festivals and galleries around the world and have won numerous awards. Rivers' work ranges in themes, including exploring unknown wilderness territories to candid and intimate portraits of real-life subjects.
The Look of Silence is a 2014 internationally co-produced documentary film directed by Joshua Oppenheimer about the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66. The film is a companion piece to his 2012 documentary The Act of Killing. Executive producers were Werner Herzog, Errol Morris, and Andre Singer. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 88th Academy Awards.
Planet Earth is a television and film documentary franchise produced and broadcast by the BBC. The franchise began in 2001 with the success of The Blue Planet. As of 2017, The Blue Planet has spawned 5 series and one feature film.
The year 2021 broke the record for the most orbital launch attempts till then (146) and most humans in space concurrently (19) despite the effects of COVID-19 pandemic.
Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America is a 1991 science fiction collage film directed by Craig Baldwin. The film presents a chronicle of U.S. involvement in Latin America through a pseudo-documentary about an alien invasion.
OceanX is an ocean exploration initiative founded by Mark Dalio and Ray Dalio, founder of investment firm Bridgewater Associates, an initiative by Dalio Philanthropies, OceanX is a “mission to explore the ocean and bring it back to the world. OceanX combines science, technology and media to explore and raise awareness for the oceans and “create a community engaged with protecting them.” The initiative also supports and facilitates ocean research for scientists, science institutions, media companies and philanthropy partners.
Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds is a 2020 documentary film directed by Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer. The film explores the cultural, spiritual, and scientific impact of meteorites, and the craters they create around the globe.