Load of rubbish!!

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Fata Morgana may arguably be maverick German director Werner Herzog's most left-field work. This is saying quite a lot considering some of the oddities in his filmography. With this film he has outright made an experimental film and not, I hasten to add, a documentary. While this often has the feel of a documentary and some sequences evoke one, this resolutely is not intended to inform the viewer of facts in any traditional sense. In fairness, many of Herzog's fiction and factual films have crossed over with one another and his cinematic style often falls into the netherworld where these two distinct forms of film overlap. Herzog himself has stated that he makes no distinction between the two formats himself. In any case, Fata Morgana is possibly the most opaque and hard to classify of his films on account of its lack of any plot or obvious message.Set in the Sahara desert of North Africa, this is seemingly an attempt to evoke a perception of the Earth from the point of view of an alien, although you'll be doing very well indeed if you pick up on this yourself without being told about it. It's a very rhythmic film where images and music work alongside each other. There are a few long tracking shots which capture both the natural beauty and the ugliness humans create. The focus often moves onto other inert objects of the desert, such as dead animals (nature), a wrecked aircraft (humankind). Later on, there are appearances from an assortment of eccentric characters all of whom reside in this harsh land. The most memorable of these is a pianist and drummer who play a very strange form of music in a fully committed fashion. Herzog said that this middle-aged couple were the owners of a brothel, although tidbits like this can only be garnered from the commentary track; in fact, this is one of the very few films that might actually be better with the commentary track playing, as the ever fascinating Herzog himself offers much interesting info on this bizarre cinematic adventure.The term Fata Morgana itself means mirages and these are returned to several times. The film opens with a succession of edits of airplanes landing all shot from exactly the same angle and each time, the planes appear to land into the midst of a mirage. Later on, we witness a different mirage of a mysterious vehicle many miles away driving in what appears to be senseless circles in the middle of the desert. Divided into three parts – 'Creation', 'Paradise' and 'The Golden Age' – there is intermittent narration that recites excerpts from an ancient creation myth. There is also – unusually for Herzog – a selection of contemporary music accompanying the imagery, with a couple of tracks from Leonard Cohen, amongst others. In truth, it's all very baffling from a logical point-of-view and is very hard to interpret the meaning. But it has a certain hypnotic effect and, if you can somehow get into its very specific rhythm it's a film that can be appreciated. It's certainly not a film for everyone though and will even pose problems for some hardened Herzog fans. It's one I get more out of the more I watch it.

This is a 75-minute movie by director Werner Herzog from almost 45 years ago, back when he wasn't even 30. The film is mostly narrated by Lotte Eisner, one of Herzog's closest collaborators (check out the story about Herzog's long walk to keep her from dying), who has a pretty interesting life story as well. She did a very fine job narrating here, her voice is nice to listen to. It is as soothing as the entire movie and if that wasn't already enough, they also included music by Leonard Cohen, one of my absolute favorites. It is certainly not a film for everybody. Haters will say we are doing nothing, but watch the desert for over an hour. Nonetheless, I enjoyed it a lot. The poetry is interesting, the music is good from start to finish. The only part I did not like that much was near the end when these two made music. It looked like it was out of a different film and did not fit the Sahara mentality at all in my opinion. But everything else was very nicely done. The images and sound is perfect to just lean back and relax. You find out a bit about the area (also outside the Sahara), landscapes, the people and animals. I highly recommend watching this. And don't forget: Blitzkrieg is insanity.

it's now some 40 years later. Herzog shows what he 'sees', and it's much more than what he was intending. Was global warming his agenda in 1971? Here is it's effects laid out dry and stenching. The polluting exodus from pollution, the advancing desolation, endless fences to the end, defining mine and not yours. To sum: people being themselves. It's not about natural beauty vs. man-made ugliness, or western civilization vs. the barbarians, it's about a very possible future world in which mankind adapts to a lizard's life. That is, if Life goes on. Myths die as storytellers die, while the world spins round. Nothing is ridiculous or wasted now that every drop counts. Diversity is strength and Music is the spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. Undomesticated animals' lives are precarious and furtive. The domesticated serve but are sacrificed first but for all comes their time when the dunes sweep in and the sweet water seeps out. 16 years to learn that monitor's secrets. Time's up. And what do those people know that we've never taken the time to learn? How can anyone in the me-first world, this future's mirage, see this and not be shaken.

This is not a movie. This is a collection of random shots taken in a fascinating part of the world, dubbed over with some random text. The footage is not that great and the text is not that great either. The end product is excruciatingly dull.On the DVD, turning the commentary on can provide some entertainment value, as the director makes a rather deranged argument that this is a sci-fi movie. It's also fascinating to read about the extraordinary risks and hardship that the crew endured to collect this footage. Too bad it's rubbish. But I think "The Making of Fata Morgana" would be a fascinating film, sort-of like 'Ed Wood" was.