MOVIE REVIEW : MYTH VS. TECHNOLOGY DOWN UNDER

Ominous grainy vistas fill the screen, gradually giving way to vast desert images wavering in the heat. We’re somewhere in the heart of Australia, and a tall, thin young geologist (Bruce Spence) in a corrugated tin shack is excitedly preparing a crucial test blast for a mining company, which expects to tap uranium in this wasteland. Suddenly a group of aborigines seems to have materialized out of nowhere to protest the testing.

Werner Herzog’s “Where the Green Ants Dream” (at the Beverly Center Cineplex) poses a classic confrontation between ancient myth and modern technology, the spiritual and material, oppressor and the oppressed, and finally between those who would preserve life and those who would endanger it. But it does all this ponderously, with increasingly literal symbolism. No film by the enfant terrible of the New German Cinema is without pertinence, vision or even pleasure (usually of a perverse kind), but it’s risky to recommend this film to anyone but Herzog loyalists.

A tribal elder (Wandjuk Marika) calmly explains to Spence that the land being explored for uranium deposits is “where the green ants dream” and, once disturbed, their uprooting will mean the loss of a whole civilization, if not the universe. Spence sends an SOS for the executive head of the mining company (Norman Kaye), and the negotiations with the aborigines begin in earnest.

So does the heavy-handedness. In trying to understand the aborigines, Spence, who is established as a perfectly decent, intelligent (though feckless) fellow, seeks out an angry dropout anthropologist (Nicolas Lathouris) who, resorting to strained simile, tells him preachily that Spence is like the only passenger who knows the train’s headed for an abyss but the emergency cord isn’t working. When the alarm on a transistor wristwatch, a gift from Kaye to an aborigine, starts ringing and no one knows how to turn it off, it’s funny. But when Kaye, Spence and the aborigines immediately thereafter get stuck in an elevator on the way up to Kaye’s office in Sydney, that’s laying on the breaking-down-of-modern-civilization metaphor pretty thick. Worse yet, Herzog gets them stuck in the elevator on the way down as well.

Thankfully, the film is shot through with Herzog’s usual absurdist humor (and boasts good performances from Spence, the stork-like helicopter pilot of “Mad Max,” and Kaye, who starred in Paul Cox’s “Lonelyhearts” and “Man of Flowers”). Standing for the white man’s obtuseness at its most benign is an adorable, pretty little old lady (Colleen Clifford, who’s wonderful) who believes her beloved pet dog is lost in the mining company tunnels. (What she and her dog were doing out in the desert in the first place is undoubtedly part of the joke.)

“Green Ants” picks up considerably when the aborigines file suit against the mining company and the commonwealth of Australia itself. That’s because the Dean Jagger-ish Basil Clarke makes the most of one of the film’s best-written parts as a scrupulous and amusingly erudite judge. But the film slides off into even more symbolism, involving a government plane (all too clearly resembling a giant green ant) that the aborigines requested and received as a good-will gesture from Kaye.

While this film is clearly and gratifyingly the work of one of the most idiosyncratic film makers in the world, it fails where it needs to succeed the most: in making the aborigines’ stance seem more than a manifestation of superstition, no matter how deeply rooted in ancient beliefs. And if we’re unable to take the aborigines seriously as saviors of the world, then it becomes hard to take the film’s anti-nuke sentiments seriously as well. Peter Weir’s “The Last Wave” was far more effective than “Where the Green Ants Dream” (Times-rated Mature for complex themes), both as an apocalyptic metaphor and as a persuasive evocation of the white man’s tragic loss of contact with nature and the universe itself. For once, Herzog seems a little late in the game.

‘WHERE THE GREEN ANTS DREAM’

An Orion Classics release of a co-production of Werner Herzog Filmproduktion and ZDF. Producer Lucki Stipetic. Writer-director Herzog. Script consultant and additional dialogue Bob Ellis. Camera Jorg Schmidt-Reitwein. Music Gabriel Faure (Requiem, Opus 48), Ernst Bloch (“Voice in the Wilderness”), Klaus-Jochen Wiese (“Temporary Galaxies”), Richard Wagner (Wesendonck Lieder), Wandjuk Marika (aboriginal music, didgeridoo). Art director Ulrich Bergfelder. Aboriginal liaison Jennifer Home. Aboriginal consultant Gary Foley. Film editor Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus. With Bruce Spence, Wandjuk Marika, Roy Marika, Norman Kaye, Colleen Clifford, Roy Barrett, Ralph Cotterill, Nicolas Lathouris, Basil Clarke, Ray Marshall, Dhunghula Marika, Gary Williams, Tony Llewellyn-Jones.

Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

Times-rated: Mature.