Only Werner Herzog would see fit to make his singular foray into 3D filmmaking a documentary about the world’s oldest cave paintings, and of course since this is Werner Herzog, “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” can’t just be a straightforward documentary, but has to include the director pontificating on the actual existence of these people who created these paintings and how they felt and thought and what they may have dreamt about, only for those dreams to be forgotten, lost to time and space forever. Oh Werner. Way to be the life of the party.

From my original review from Examiner.com:

“Of course, this is a Werner Herzog movie, so he has more on his mind then just pretty drawings of horses and old footprints – he spends time thinking about the people who created all of this art, and what kind of people they were and if they had goals and dreams and desires, and if so, what were they? Of course no one can ever know what kind of dreams these people could have had (hence the film’s title), though it may be safe to assume that some of these people dreamed vividly of the wild animals living among them. He also takes a little time to get into what is essentially the world’s oldest porn – there is one painting in the cave that appears to be the lower torso of a woman, and this is followed by experts showing off some tiny little figurines of headless busty woman that date back thousands and thousands of years (nice to see that people really haven’t changed very much, at least on a base level). And of course he has to throw in just a little bit of the bizarre, as he closes out the movie with a coda about a crocodile habitat that gets its water from a power plan and how they thrived in the artificial environment and how albino (possibly) radioactive crocodiles are flourishing in this croc-only greenhouse.”

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