Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
Shortly after the Gulf War, oil fires were raging all through Kuwait. In the week before this sea of fire would be extinguished, Werner Herzog filmed this apocalyptic landscape with its murky skies, scorched earth and capricious flames.
Lessons of Darkness is one of Herzog's most singular works — a pseudo-documentary that deliberately mythologizes the Kuwait oil fires as an alien, apocalyptic landscape, stripping away political context in favor of pure visual and existential contemplation. The cinematography is genuinely extraordinary: sweeping aerial shots of burning oil fields rendered in near-abstract grandeur, with a hypnotic, operatic quality that few documentary filmmakers have ever achieved. Its novelty is unimpeachable — no other film treats real-world catastrophe quite like this, framing it as science fiction from another world, narrated in detached, oracular tones over Wagner and Mahler. The 'plot' and 'acting' categories are almost inapplicable by design — there is no dramatic arc or performance in the traditional sense, hence lower scores there. The ending, while consistent with the film's tone, doesn't deliver a strong resolution so much as a final image, which is philosophically appropriate but somewhat inert dramatically.