In the final scene of Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Werner Herzog’s 3D homage to the recently discovered French Cauvet Caves, the film switches gears. Pristine Paleolithic cave paintings give way to a scene of radioactive mutant albino crocodiles about to get loose and head over to Chauvet.

Lunacy from a headstrong director? Hardly. Merely the latest masterwork from the unique eye of a filmmaker talented enough to make the crocodile scene feel anything but incongruous as we realize the fraility of our human need to preserve and classify.

Herzog has hauled a steamboat over a mountain (Fitzcarraldo), gone to Antarctica to make a documentary about it’s outsider resident scientists (Encounters at the End of the World), and refashioned a controversial film as a funny, irreverent noir thriller (Bad Lieutenant).

In Cave of Forgotten Dreams, channeling his archaeologist grandfather, he goes into the Chauvet Caves, discovered in 1994 after being sealed off for thousands of years by moving rock formations. Braving the cave’s toxic gases and operating on a narrow gangplank with cameras limited to what could be carried in by hand, he presents both another eerie environment, and fascinating and dedicated if eccentric scientists. In a dramatic scene demonstrating the stillness of the cave, the film explodes with the sound of it’s human visitors actually able to hear their own heartbeat.

One of the paintings, the Panel of the Horses, demonstrates the intelligence of its makers some 20,000 years ago. Herzog, stunned by how the viewer’s own shadow actually becomes an apparently intentional part of the image, references the famous scene of Fred Astaire dancing with his own shadow in Swing Time. When the shadow goes off in a separate way, Astaire follows the shadow.

Paintings of horses, of lions, of a half-woman, half bison; Confrontal Rhinoceros, males fighting, a male and a female about to mate–the Chauvet Caves, closed to tourists, and severely restricted to scientists, now has a wonderful filmed record. Let the radioactive, mutant albino crocodiles try to alter THAT.

8.5 Herzogs out of 10

In the final scene of Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Werner Herzog’s 3D homage to the recently discovered French Cauvet Caves, the film switches gears. Pristine Paleolithic cave paintings give way to a scene of radioactive mutant albino crocodiles about to get loose and head over to Chauvet.

Lunacy from a headstrong director? Hardly. Merely the latest masterwork from the unique eye of a filmmaker talented enough to make the crocodile scene feel anything but incongruous as we realize the fraility of our human need to preserve and classify.

Herzog has hauled a steamboat over a mountain (Fitzcarraldo), gone to Antarctica to make a documentary about it’s outsider resident scientists (Encounters at the End of the World), and refashioned a controversial film as a funny, irreverent noir thriller (Bad Lieutenant).

In Cave of Forgotten Dreams, channeling his archaeologist grandfather, he goes into the Chauvet Caves, discovered in 1994 after being sealed off for thousands of years by moving rock formations. Braving the cave’s toxic gases and operating on a narrow gangplank with cameras limited to what could be carried in by hand, he presents both another eerie environment, and fascinating and dedicated if eccentric scientists. In a dramatic scene demonstrating the stillness of the cave, the film explodes with the sound of it’s human visitors actually able to hear their own heartbeat.

One of the paintings, the Panel of the Horses, demonstrates the intelligence of its makers some 20,000 years ago. Herzog, stunned by how the viewer’s own shadow actually becomes an apparently intentional part of the image, references the famous scene of Fred Astaire dancing with his own shadow in Swing Time. When the shadow goes off in a separate way, Astaire follows the shadow.

Paintings of horses, of lions, of a half-woman, half bison; Confrontal Rhinoceros, males fighting, a male and a female about to mate–the Chauvet Caves, closed to tourists, and severely restricted to scientists, now has a wonderful filmed record. Let the radioactive, mutant albino crocodiles try to alter THAT.

8.5 Herzogs out of 10