What is a "movie about penguins"? Herzog's tone may sound sarcastic. But it seems to me that he would have preferred to assert himself from the very beginning: "My problems are not the same as theirs!" Herzog was also curious about nature, but his questions sounded like Somewhat weird and out of tune with "science". Perhaps, they should be classified as philosophy? Guided by these questions, we see a special population: those who meet at the end of the world. Scientists, philosophers, travelers, explorers, etc., and it is the "dream" that binds them together to this little dot. Herzog has recorded countless times in other films what a dream is: the challenge to the unsurpassable giant, the anger at God, from the dungeon to the human world, from the human world to the land of the grizzly bear. These dreams are not grand, most of them are absurd and tragic, but like any grand dream, their essence lies in "arrogance". Humans have always drawn a boundary between themselves and not themselves. The meaning of this boundary is not about blocking, but more about transcendence and yearning – in Herzog’s lens, this is the meaning of being a human being . Humans are not confined to their own limited territory, they love fantasy and chase after the eternal high, which makes them obsessed with a glacier, a sound or a kind of particle, because in these things appear what they are looking for. infinity and eternity. I guess, Herzog might say: This pursuit is doomed to failure, but it is failure that keeps the dream from stopping.
Herzog is not opposed to scientific penguin films. He also specially interviewed a little penguin who was "insane", and ran straight to the top of a distant mountain alone. But his shots always have the ability to "turn corruption into magic", "turning" a scientific penguin film into a humanistic and religious film. However, rather than turning popular science into humanities, it is better to say that he wants to downplay the distinction between the two. In the final interview, the scientist who tried to make contact with the mysterious neutrino through his instrument directly told us that science and religion have different paths. And Herzog finally attributed this to the unique position of man through the mouth of a philosopher: "It is through our eyes that the universe sees itself; it is through our ears that the universe hears its harmony, We are witnesses through which the universe realizes its glory."
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