ViewGuide

Created May 15, 2011 03:35PM PST • Edited Dec 18, 2024 06:05PM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Really Great 4.5

   A perfect visual experience in 3D, Cave of Forgotten Dreams will also likely be really great in 2D. However, it’s worth leaving home for the immersive 3D experience on a true big screen.

   From row 4 center of Santana Row’s CineArts, the colored wayfarers (3D glasses) provided a field of vision a bit wider than the screen, a perfect portal into one of the most amazing and beautiful discoveries in human history. Werner Herzog’s documentary explores Chauvet Cave in France, home to 30,000 year-old wall paintings, far and away the Earth’s oldest known artworks.

   While necessarily reverential to this tomb of human heritage, the movie’s stately pace occasionally comes to a full stop, as when the cave’s caretaker asks for silence so we can hear our heartbeats. The subject is worthy of the hauteur, though the slow and pretentious style requires some stamina from the viewer.

   The paintings never fail to dazzle however. Gorgeous and sophisticated illustrations, they’re hardly the stick figures one associates with cave paintings. Many are alive with movement, all are shockingly sophisticated, most are stunningly beautiful. These prehistoric marvels bring to mind Marvel pen and ink drawings, especially with Thor playing in the same multiplexes as Cave of Forgotten Dreams right now.

   Cave of Forgotten Dreams induces a meditative state far from the norm of most moviegoing experiences. Combining the most ancient human art with the most advanced 3D filmmaking makes for a fascinating juxtaposition of human creativity. Makes for new dreams even.

4. Acting

   Very Good 3.5

   Herzog’s English narration has to overcome his stilted Bavarian intonations and occasional weirdness.

5. Male Stars Very Good 3.5

6. Female Stars Very Good 3.5

7. Female Costars Very Good 3.5

8. Male Costars Very Good 3.5

10. Film

    Really Great 4.5

    Werner Herzog turns in his second perfect direction in two years here, following his nasty triumph in Bad Lieutenant Port of Call New Orleans. One assumes his inspiration to include large lizards in Bad Lt. NO came from the nuclear powered colony near Chauvet Cave.

11. Direction Perfect 5.0

12. Play Very Good 3.5

    What is a French perfumer doing sniffing the hillside where the cave is located? Why also the side trip to a nearby reptile farm that draws its heat from a nuclear power plant? Herzog draws a tortured analogy between the albino crocodile at the farm and we humans. He should have stopped while he was ahead.

13. Music Perfect 5.0

14. Visuals Perfect 5.0

    Fantastic art is presented in a wonderfully immersive 3D experience. A detour into carved Venuses and other prehistoric figurines also strikes a chord of deeply human recognition.

15. Content

16. Edge

    Tame 1.0

17. Sex Innocent 1.0

18. Violence Gentle 1.0

19. Rudeness Polite 1.0

21. Reality

    Glib 1.2

    Herzog detours to a nuclear powered crocodile farm near the cave, home to an albino alligator. He then suggests the gator’s mutant coloring is caused by the nearby nuclear power plant that warms the farm. Poppycock, per a debunking in Slate.

22. Circumstantial Glib 1.5

23. Biological Natural 1.0

24. Physical Natural 1.0