Where the Green Ants Dream (1985)

Well Meaning, but...

I have a great deal of respect for Werner Herzog and have been moved by many of his films, but unfortunately this isn't one of them.

Stunning visuals. The Australian Bush is an amazing sight. An Aboriginal face has something about it that makes you think you're looking back through all 40,000 years of their history, into something wise and mystical.

"Are you enjoying the movie?" I was asked after 30 minutes.
"I'm still waiting for it to start."

I'm sorry, but there is a sole conflict throughout. A timely conflict, a timely topic, a very important and worthwhile cause for consideration. But alas, the characters are as flat as the landscape, and the resolution of the plot is one you can predict before you finish reading the cover blurb. April 13, 2008

FATA MORGANA!

Werner Herzog is the perfect and unique embodiment of the always worried, irreverent, unsatisfied and non conformist director that enjoys to walk on the razor edge and delights to expose limit situations at the eve of reach the boiling point.

That's why his entire cinematography has been signed for newness and original proposals, featured by unexplored territories and unthinkable stages.

In this case, we assist to the clash of two civilizations, visibly differenced , the ancestral aborigines and the western way of life, where the myth and the progress will collide like the unavoidable crash of two trains displacing each one, in opposite senses.

A company will settle in the middle of the Australian desert, in order to explore and exploit uranium reserves. But they will be faced for ancestral tribes who oppose them due they will interrupt the dream of the green ants.

A movie dedicated to Herzog' s mother, with intriguing and sharp reflections all the way through, when this case be discussed in the Supreme Court, through a very interesting trial, where the happy ending will be absent.

The final sequence will invite you to think and reflect.
September 17, 2006

This movie become more topical as time passes

Modern civilization and primitive tribal groups do not have the same worldview - and it is this discrepancy that is examined in
Werner Herzog's excellent Australian film. A mining company has located a terrific reserve of valuable uranium in the desert of the outback...but the only problem is that the Aboriginal elders are guarding this land as one of their holiest sites..for here the green ants dream.

These green ants - actually green termites, have a special sense
that orients them to the earth's magnetism so they are wonderful
predictors of weather. If their homes are dug up, then the
Aborigines' universe, their sense of time and place, will be
uprooted. So the people attached to the land argue in court
their right to this ancestral holy spot.

Some of the village elders are depicted by wonderfully wise
Bushmen. That alone makes this a fabulous film. The director treats his themss with dignity and quiet power. See it. July 17, 2006

Where the Red Tape Rules.

"Where the Green Ants Dream" remains one of Werner Herzog's most intriguing feature films. Its release was sandwiched in between the controversies, hardships and media outrage of "Fitzcarraldo" and the emotional difficulties of Herzog's final collaboration with Klaus Kinski on "Cobra Verde." The film doesn't quite possess the myth and legend of other Herzog features and as a result as quietly drifted into semi-obscurity. The director himself has aided this drift by his reluctance to discuss the film, as if by his own admission it is a lesser entry in his filmography. Despite this WGAD is visually stunning and easily one of Herzog's most beautifully haunting films. The camera and Herzog is clearly in love with the wide open vistas of the Australian outback, and in their emptiness and vastness they remind one of the desert landscapes glimpsed in "Fata Morgana." From a thematic point of view Herzog continues his quest to chart the dreams and myths of isolated individuals or communities. In this case he explores the most marginal of groups; aborigines. In charting their efforts to stake a legal claim to the land they have inhabited for thousands of years Herzog shows his fury at the bureaucracy and red tape of the modern world. A world of faceless businessmen with capitalist aims living in faceless buildings in faceless capital cities. This is a world which rejects dreams in favour of cold hard facts and figures. The dichotomy between the two worlds is highlighted amusingly by an elevators mechanical failure and one of the aborigines struggling with a digital watch. Herzog fills his films with non-professional aborigine actors and their stiffness and inability in front of camera drains some of the films noble efforts for authenticity. May 20, 2006

Herzog's Mad Max

I have never seen a Herzog film I haven't liked, just some more than others. This is an in-betweener, but excellent, as always. Similar in stark landscapes to "Fata Morgana", "Where the Green Ants Dream" offers barren vistas, mounds of dirt, holes in the ground, and apocalyptic hovels. The character of the anthropologist sums up the film best when he describes modern Western technology and what it has done to the biosphere as a man on a train who knows the tracks ahead are out and all he can do is run to the rear of the train. Definitely one of Herzog's more accessible stories, and perfect for viewing in an anthropology course. The ending reminds me of classic J.G. Ballard, in which the dynamic character chooses desolation over re-integration into the hellish culture from which he came. And, yeah, there's a bit of "Mad Max" in the apocalyptic theme as well. May 3, 2006

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