Cave of Forgotten Dreams is, basically, nonsense. A labored attempt to cross several millenia of generations by introducing the oldest known visual arts to the latest in 3D technology. It's an intriguing idea, but it fails on so many counts that even what is intermittently interesting about it is swallowed up in memory by everything that is botched. The most damning, maybe, is that 3D does not look at all like how we actually perceive the world. An art history professor I discussed the film with said that she did appreciate the 3D in some ways, having looked at quite a number of normal photographs of the art work. I hadn't seen any 2D versions to compare it to, but the strangeness of 3D actually worked against my enjoyment of the pieces -- like the new technology was battling the old art and winning in a big, big way. The most interesting moments, for me, were shots of the caves and surrounding landscape without the paintings in them. The ability of 3D filmmaking to transform something real and palpable into a disorienting, surreal version of itself is the only possibility of 3D that seems honestly worth exploring to this writer. To turn real life into a bizarre theme park ride.
Late in the film Herzog travels to an indoor replication of a tropical jungle to further pontificate on the oldness of alligators and their perceptions of things. From nearly any kind of standpoint it, it's a self-consciously silly aside that, like much of the rest of the film, seems to be Herzog playing up his wacky German persona. Whether this Troy McClure-esque act is a cynical money-grab, playing on America's fondness for goofy foreign caricatures or Herzog actually beginning to buy into his own mythology is difficult to discern. In any event, there's a shot that travels through some leafy palms and opens up into the aquarium that felt so much like the realization of all those goofy early '90s Virtual Reality promises of the future that it made me wish his next project would be a 3D Aguirre revisited trek into the Amazon. Preferably without his voice anywhere near it.
The rest of the film, unfortunately, is a strange mixture of a talking head documentary in which no one seems to be saying the things Herzog wants them to, so he badgers them into answering questions in a weird way, or the pictures of the 3D images. This is where my interest in the movie will veer into the purely subjective and possibly ignorant. I don't really care about the paintings at all. Some were interesting, some less so, but as an artifact of pre-history I was unable to glean any compelling story from their existence. And, as a relative novice in the field of painting, their composition did not strike me in the way it seemed to pound many of my contemporaries. I am a man trapped in the modern(ist) world, and much of my interest in art lies only with its ability to comment on itself and a world I recognize. Without a historical context to attach it to (something that, obviously, can never exist), I find it difficult to feel anything but indifferent about most of it. This is my own personal failing, and something I cannot necessarily hold against the film.
But everything else, especially Herzog's own juvenile and obnoxious pontification on nature and the world are things that, at least from my perspective, are real problems that dampen a once-in-almost-anyone's-lifetime experience. Herzog seems to be fighting a company's desire to turn the film into a more normal, everyday Discovery Channel-esque movie, but this fight makes the film so much more annoying than something along those lines would be. To make matters worse, his narration is mixed so high in the soundtrack that its booming insistence makes his platitudes all the more groan-worthy, given their Voice of God status. In all honesty, I wanted to be much more specific in this section of the review, but two months after the screening I'm having quite a lot of trouble remembering any specific lines. It has all achieved a droning hum of Herzog's accented lisp saying "nature" over and over.
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