Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds

A stone falls from the sky and buries itself in the ground. Thousands of years later someone finds it. The documentary follows those stones. There is a crater in Mexico and the impact that ended the dinosaurs happened there. In Australia the indigenous people made stones fallen from the sky part of their own accounts. In Norway a jazz musician collects microscopic meteorite particles from roofs and car parks. In Antarctica scientists look for black stones on the ice, because any black stone found there has come from the sky. A priest shows the Vatican's meteorite collection. Werner Herzog directs with the volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer; the two had worked together before. It is a British and American production. The documentary does not deliver scientific information alone; at every stop the person working on the subject moves to the centre of the narrative. Herzog is inside the film as narrator and does not hide his own remarks. The matter it treats is the mark left in people by what comes from the sky; the film gives it through geology and through belief. The narrative is in pieces and not chronological; each section is a place and a person. The documentary does not go into disaster scenarios; the question of a possible impact is kept short. Its best sections are not the scientific but the personal; a story told in a Mexican village carries the feeling of the film. Its limit is structure; the sections are not equally strong, the pace is low, and some stops are unnecessary. Who it is for: viewers who like Herzog's documentaries and science narrative. Who it is not for: it is scattered, slow, and the ending does not gather it.