I also watched, by some coincedence, Into the Inferno which is a Werner Hertzog documentary not about Tom Hanks, Robert Langdon, or Dan Brown but about volcanoes and the science and myths we create about them. Odd it came out the same weekend as Inferno (Tom Hanks movie) but it did – it’s a Netflix original that you can watch now on the streaming service.
If you aren’t familiar with Werner Herzog, he’s a mesmerizingly crazy film maker who usually makes odd documentaries about odd people (and sometimes fake documentaries about fake people and, earlier in his career, mad fictional movies). In this one, he’s set out to make a film not so much about volcanoes but about… I dunno… the communities and peoples who surround them. There is some volcanic history and science but he’s more interested in the scientists than what they are doing. He also covers the tribal and social lives of people who live in the shadow of volcanoes.
Some of this is interesting – like when they go to North Korea and documents how the society mythologizes one of their big volcanoes and inserts Dear Leader (and his grandfather) into those myths. He then talks a bunch about North Korea in general and in ways that have nothing to do with volcanoes. He also notes in another segment that volcanoes form obsidian which ancient peoples used to make knives and spears… and then spends a long time in a dig site in Africa watching archaeologists dig up fragments of a long dead human (and not even the obsidian weapons they might have used).
It’s like he wants to make a movie about volcanoes but he gets distracted by fascinating things he sees on the way. Which I guess is fine if you like to listen to Herzog wax eloquent in his German accent about random things, but not so great when maybe you wanted to learn something about volcanoes. It’s a failure at that but still a kind of interesting film about other stuff, I guess.
Score: 73