SALT AND FIRE is another clunky misfire from director Werner Herzog, whose last good movie was perhaps RESCUE DAWN back in 2006. I really think he should stick to making excellent documentaries like INTO THE ABYSS as that's obviously where his skill lies nowadays. This is less a film, more a heavy-handed warning against the human cost of man-made ecological disaster. The setting is Bolivia, where a German scientist and some fellow researchers find themselves kidnapped by the mysterious members of an organisation for reasons unknown. The first half of the film is pure awkwardness, not helped by the incredibly stilted line delivery of lead actress Veronica Ferres; the reliable Michael Shannon does his best but even that's not much this time around. The second half has some good visuals, but this subject matter would be much better in a documentary (and a separate documentary on anamorphic art would be a treat too).

This review contains the plot spoiler in the film's own description used by Amazon. The opening scene we see Dr. Laura Summerfeld, cuffed, and blindfolded. The film then digresses 30 hours as we see her and two colleges fly in a plane and they all get kidnapped, taking us up to where we were. Why the flashback? I have no idea. One of the bad guys in a ski mask wears glasses and sits in a wheel chair. One of the guys she meets at the airport wears glasses and sits in a wheel chair. Once Laura's blindfold is removed, umm...Yeah, they thought it was stupid too. The 3 scientists are to survey an ecological disaster that destroyed a lake and is causing a salt flat to spread...soon it will encompass the world, we are told, although this salt flat is on an island so I had trouble with the math on that one. Oh yeah, volcano that will explode and kill the planet, some talk of aliens who like western fat chicks as predicted by Nostradamus or something. The dialogue was very idiotic attempting to go deep. And then Laura ends up on the salt flat with two blind boys. The whole kidnapping thing was idiotic. It sounded like they were playing Islamic prayer calls in this South America "desert" as background music. I kept thinking this was near Morocco or something. (Filmed in Bolivia). Plot didn't make sense. Film was slow moving. Acting was just a phone call away.

13 August 2017. Salt and Fire defies any genre label and that unfortunately is a big problem. This movie really doesn't have any consistent logic or theme that really ties its separate subplots together. In short, this film is a meandering mess. The nonchalant music of almost random musical strings, accordion, organ sounds then piano notes seem screechingly incongruous to the presenting emotions of the fearful, angry and somewhat weird kidnapping and the bewildering, strange airport scenes unlike the more foreign flavored sounds from the psychologically mysterious and haunting movie Nomads (1986). A lot of the music seems to come from the 1960s jazz age of acoustical notes of the Beatniks with their staccato poetry that is very dissociated fom this supposedly dramatic mystery occult thriller instead of an experimental Avant Garde film.

There's the utterly unnecessary use of the flashback. And why shoot any of the landscape shots with our primary characters blindfolded anyway. There is the unnecessary initial lecherous male scientist behavior. There is the underwhelming response to lost airport luggage scene compared the more eerie and almost monstrously ethereal The Langoliers (1995 television mini-series) scenes. The mysterious antagonists don't have a very natural flair in their delivery as Alan Rickman's early breakout and flamboyant performance in Die Hard (1988). Even Dr. Sommerfeld's own behavior seems awkwardly uncharacteristic of the circumstances she finds herself in.

Surprisingly, there is not a lot of pace in the movie, not a lot of interesting action even though there is a kidnapping, and not a lot of appealing interesting connections in this movie. In fact, the kidnapping plot isn't even really necessary to the movie. The mysterious unknown entity behind the kidnapping had obviously other more interesting ways to introduce itself thus making the beginning part of the movie feel quite artificial and dull compared to The Triangle (2005, television mini-series). The Chief Executive Officer's behavior was incredulous and whose investors must have been on some sort of drugs when they approved him.

It's sad to see Werner Herzog's screenplay so clumsy, dull, and disjointed with dialogue that seems to come from intelligentsia devoid of soul or real humanity. None of the characters portrayed in the film seem real, but appear more as caricatures based on some words on paper. Herzog misses the whole potential of such classics developed in a similar fashion as Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972) where it appears that an entire world, itself, may be the source of the movie's entire screenplay. For all the sense of impending disaster and catastrophe, most of the movie remains stuck on "keep talking" without any action...something that seems to belie the true purpose of the movie. Such direction one might assume must alienate a large segment of Western movie fans who are used to looking at direct action, primary research such as found in the sci fi mystery thriller Sphere (1998). More than a third way into the movie it seems everybody except the audience even has an inkling of this disaster everybody is talking about compared to an action monster movie like Frank Marshall's Congo (1995),Robert Wise's science fiction classic The Andromeda Strain (1971),or even the promising but flawed Michael Mann's Nazi horror flick The Keep (1983). What made the science fiction classic 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) so special wasn't so much written dialogue, but the crisp, photographic messages that exuded from the large screen along with a strain of music that complemented, not clashed with its mysterious subject matter. In some ways Herzog's film is a more slow, plodding, and uninspiring version of Ron Howard's more compelling Da Vinci Code (2006). Unlike Da Vinci Code, Herzog's forces its audience almost at the halfway point into an almost mind-numbing creative, intelligent sounding narrative that the audience has no ideas of how what's being said connects to anything.

Finally, the audience is shown a picture taken of a person by Dr. Sommerfield, yet the person is almost turned away from the camera. Then eventually she even loses her what might have been her interesting "scientist" persona. There are two boys who somehow speak some English and apparently like to lie listening to the ground and play with Legos in the unremitting sun. There's no time spend on a decision of whether to go or stay at a place that is quite uninviting but with perhaps 30 miles travel in inhospitable conditions and which Dr. Sommerfield calculates there is about a week of provisions in her possession. It's too bad that Lawrence Krauss who is an internationally known theoretical physicist and plays Krauss in the movie didn't get a chance to work with someone like Christopher Nolan who allowed a substantial amount of Kip Thorne's theoretical work on blackholes as well as alien planets and stars, who actually developed the first idea for the script, and who is another noted theoretical physicist, that became part of the blockbuster science fiction movie Interstellar (2014). Instead of meandering on personal issues of the characters as in Salt and Fire that didn't have much relevance to the movie as a whole, Insterstellar, kept its focus on the personal issues that would become part of the essence of what the science fiction elements as presented in that movie were all about and what the audience came to truly care about and the emotive, human reason why they connected to that movie.

For a long time this movie becomes a boring survival movie but unlike the over-rated Sean Penn's Into the Wild (2007),Herzog pretentiousness is even greater than Penn's in his excessive use of gorgeous photography. At least Touching the Void (2003),a survival movie set on the Peruvian mountains had intense emotive drama with amazing use of the camera. It would have been interesting to see what Lars von Trier who directed Melancholia (2011) might have accomplished with the same theme as Herzog Werner began with.