![]() Accordingly, the doc either will or won’t appeal to audiences. At times Inferno plays a bit more educationally than audiences might expect there’s just as much about the fine science of volcanology to be learned here as there is about humanity’s relationship to nature’s violence. Into the Inferno is delivered in Herzog’s typically inquisitive, conversational style, but the filmmaker ultimately takes a back seat to Oppenheimer, who’s an absolutely knowledgeable guide, if not necessarily one of Herzog’s more engaging documentary subjects. Before the film’s end, he also explores an Indonesian eruption where the pyroclastic flows (the combination of quickly-moving lava and gas during an eruption, like the world’s worst landslide) eliminated all but one member of the population in minutes, an East African dig site where some of the world’s first humans have been preserved, an abandoned Icelandic town covered in magma, and North Korea. There, the volcano is treated as a point of worship, and it’s believed that spirits influence the flows of lava. In the film’s first, they investigate one volcano on Ambrym Island, an archipelago off the east Australian coast. Into the Inferno, for its part, makes the case that if a supervolcano ever really went off, it wouldn’t matter.Ī collaboration between Herzog and noted Cambridge volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer, and based on his book Eruptions That Shook the World, Into the Inferno also follows a number of loose threads, all tied around that central thesis of the volcano’s dormant, frightening dominion over mankind. Earlier this year, Lo and Behold examined, through a series of loosely connected vignettes, how the internet is slowly pulling us apart from one another. ![]() The best of Werner Herzog’s documentary work matches his subjects (usually wild-eyed dreamers in his likeness, often putting themselves in grave danger in the pursuit of a given passion), and if Into the Inferno doesn’t quite achieve the heights of a Grizzly Man or Encounters at the End of the World, it still ties into the long-tenured filmmaker’s master thesis: man’s infinite arrogance in the face of nature will one day be its ultimate undoing. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |