A diver explores under the Antarctic ice in Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World.

THINKFilm / Henry Kaiser

If you’ve ever wanted to visit the South Pole, and who hasn’t (just kidding!), you can take an armchair tour without subjecting yourself to the 20-below temperatures in German director Werner Herzog’s fascinating Encounters at the End of the World.

Herzog is no stranger to daredevil adventures. He once dragged a ship over the Andes for Fitzcarraldo and more recently delved into the psyche of a nature lover who was eaten by one of the bears he had come to think of as his friends in Grizzly Man.

But Encounters is a more personal and deeper documentary than Grizzly Man. In it, Herzog not only looks at some of the odd beasts — and humans — who live in Antarctica, but ponders the future of humankind as well, coming to the conclusion that we’re doomed. He wonders what some future visitors will think humans were doing at the McMurdo encampment, the heart of the U.S. Antarctic Program, having left behind giant buses, huge buildings and a honeycomb of tunnels beneath the packed ice.

But Encounters at the End of the World is no doom and gloom encounter, even if Herzog sometimes brings in an unseen chorus for religious chants to back up some of the more ethereal sights on screen. And there are many — underwater views of the sun shining through ice that resembles yellow clouds over a rubble-strewn landscape; huge columns of ice hanging down from the surface into a blue sea; an undersea “road” cobbled with chattering clams; a phosphorescent glowing jellyfish; red-hot magma flaming up from the bowels of a volcano. The images are lovely, but sometimes startling, such as a group of skinny starfish-like creatures.

Herzog, good storyteller that he is, also often amuses. One of the funniest moments comes when a survival instructor tests the skills of new visitors to Antarctica on their ability to find a “missing” group member should they be caught in a snow-blinding whiteout. To get a sense of whiteout conditions, several people don white trash buckets over their heads and are then tethered together in a group attempt to walk a fairly straight line of about 100 yards to find the “missing” man.

There are close ups of seals and the sounds of their out-of-this-world haunting calls to each other from under the ice. In one sequence a wrong-way penguin breaks away from his in-step fellows who are marching seaward to instead head for the mountains on his own in what Herzog says is a doomed trek. There’s even a suggestion by the director, who wrote the narration, of the possibility of penguin prostitution. Yet because this is a G-rated film, nothing much comes of it.

Nearly as unusual are the people who live in Antarctica, including a former lawyer-turned Peace Corps worker who once escaped the wrath of a machete-wielding Mayan tribe in Guatemala and now drives a 67,000-pound bus across the ice.

Many of the inhabitants turn out to be misfits and wanderers who are amateur philosophers and poets. One woman tells how, before she wound up at the bottom of the world, she once drove across Africa in a garbage truck and later traveled from Ecuador to Peru in a sewer pipe. At McMurdo, where she’s a “computer expert” (of course!), she sometimes entertains at the local amateur-night show by scrunching into a duffel bag on stage.

For the many times Herzog ponders whether man will some day become extinct on this planet, there are signs of hope. A group of scientists discover new species in the waters under the ice and try to trace their discoveries back to the evolution of life on Earth. Even at the South Pole, deep under the ice, life goes on.

****Encounters at the End of the World

Narrator: Werner Herzog.

Rated: G.

mjanuson@projo.com