When I heard that there were going to be two Herzog documentaries released this year, I was pumped. I knew one was going to be about the internet. You may remember my review about that and enthusiasm. Then I found out that the second one was about volcanoes, which, if you can think of the internet as very in our control and of our creation, volcanoes are a destructive force of nature, out of our hands, and very capable of shutting down mankind’s creations.

Lo and Behold was very theoretical, nebulous, and introspective for a movie about how the internet has connected us all and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Volcanoes, while not 100% predictable or understood, are still well studied and more predictable than the future of technology (look at any science fiction novel that tried to predict what the year 2000 was going to be like). The great irony is that Lo and Behold had an actual theatrical release, whereas Into the Inferno was distributed by Netflix, a service that is almost entirely streaming over the internet at this point.

For Into the Inferno, Herzog teamed up with vulcanologist Clive Oppenheimer, whom had he met on the set of Encounters at the End of the World. They made a good team. Oppenheimer is a lovable volcano nerd whose exuberance and enthusiasm make the technical descriptions engaging. Herzog is himself, which is to say that he’s very interested in the small, very human details. Every documentary he helms ends up being just as much an anthropological work as it is art. Together they vowed to explore aspects of how volcanoes effected human culture, no matter how weird it gets. The result is a portrait of how nature has helped build and destroy humanity from the very beginning. And it also gets very weird, as they explore volcano based cults, North Korean mythology, and sift for early hominid bones with paleo-anthropologists in the Awash Valley, Ethiopia.

This is also one of the most beautiful movies of this year. It is just full of astonishing shots of rolling mountains. There are amazing scenes of visible magma inside calderas, just popping and bubbling up. The only sounds are the dangerous grumbles and the splatters. It’s as inside the inferno as many of us will ever get, which is really, truly amazing. When the camera isn’t on the volcanoes, there’s incredible footage of unique cultural practices, dances, and villages.

Into the Inferno is vast and beautiful. We are blessed to live a year with two feature length Herzog documentaries. This is a nature documentary but more so a cultural one. It covers so many parts of the world in a way that many of us will never get to experience and we shouldn’t, lest we destroy them.

-Alli Hobbs