Herzog's spectacular documentary is as odd as you'd expect, writes DONALD CLARKE.

IN A RECENT interview, Werner Herzog revealed that he had to compete with James Cameron for an invitation from the National Science Foundation to film in the wastes of the Antarctic. Cameron proposed bringing a crew of 36. Herzog's team comprised just three. Unsurprisingly, the organisation chose the director of Aguirre: Wrath of Godover the director of Titanic.

Had Cameron succeeded, we would, no doubt, have ended up with something glossier and more spectacular. It would have been in 3-D and it would have music by James Horner. Instead, we are

left with a defiantly peculiar documentary that seems slightly embarrassed by the moments of beauty it encounters. “I told them I was not going to make a film about fluffy penguins,” the great man says. We are, in short, left with a Werner Herzog film.

Herzog travels to the McMurdo Station on Ross Island, where he encounters a band of eccentrics, each of whom could slip comfortably into one of his dramas. This woman can curl her body into a small holdall (and does). This biologist forces his colleagues to watch science-fiction flicks from the 1950s. Herzog enjoys the company of these oddballs, but the surprising homeliness of the camp distresses him. “They have abominations such as an aerobics studio,” he fumes.

His mood gets less heavy (you’d never say Werner Herzog’s mood “lightens” exactly) when they

head into the yawning wilderness to encounter enthusiastic volcanologists, Ernest Shackleton’s base and a busy seal colony. The director is clearly interested in the enthusiasms of those he meets and the nature footage, accompanied by appropriately spooky music, features some truly astonishing sights.

This superb film is, however, most notable for its investigations into the endangered beast that is the Greater Spotted Herzog. Every line Herzog intones helps flesh out the myth of the stubbornly fatalistic, mordantly funny observer who abhors sentimentality and woolly thinking.

He does eventually encounter penguins, but, characteristically hungry for the bleak image, he turns his camera from the happy colony towards one lone misanthrope paddling into the wilds and (the zoologist confirms) a lonely, icy death. It's Aguirre the Penguin. It's Pengarraldo. James Cameron would have followed the herd.

Directed by Werner Herzog Club, IFI, Dublin, 99 min