The Wild Blue Yonder


The Wild Blue Yonder is a 2005 science fiction film by German director Werner Herzog. It was presented at the 62nd Venice Film Festival, where it was awarded the FIPRESCI Prize. It went on to screen in competition at the Mar del Plata Film Festival and the Sitges Film Festival, it won "Carnet Jove – Special Mention" at the latter. Most of the film consists of recontextualized documentary footage which is overlaid with fictional narration. This technique was used in Herzog's earlier film Lessons of Darkness.
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.

Plot

The film is about an extraterrestrial who came to Earth several decades ago from a water planet, after it experienced an ice age. 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 to explore the possibility that a new, uninfected human colony might be established there. After deciding Blue Yonder was suitable for human habitation, the astronauts returned to Earth 820 years later, only to discover that the planet had been abandoned in their absence.

Soundtrack

Trivia

According to the DVD extras, the interview with the alien is filmed in Niland, CA, and nearby Slab City, CA.