When Werner Herzog latches onto a topic, he doesn’t just create one movie and then move on to the next object of fascination. He goes in-depth, sometimes even returning to something he’s worked on before. Right now, it appears that thing is volcanoes—and he’s going full-force into investigating humanity's fascination with the unpredictable agents of chaos. Back in 1977, Herzog made La Soufriere: Waiting for an Inevitable Disaster, a documentary about a volcano on the island of Guadeloupe, which had been evacuated due to an impending eruption. Now, in 2016, the director has two volcano-themed films on the docket: Salt and Fire, a narrative feature that screened at the Toronto International Film Festival about ecologists in Bolivia dealing with a potential supervolcano disaster, and Into the Inferno, a documentary about volcanoes in Iceland, Indonesia, and Ethiopia that will hit Netflix on Oct. 28. The first trailer for the latter movie debuted today, and it is—as one might expect—a beguiling mix of the director's signature voiceover work and beautiful/frightening footage of bubbling red-hot magma. Planet Earth II doesn’t have a release date yet, so this looks like your best bet for a hypnotizing nature documentary for the rest of 2016.
Into the Inferno Trailer: Volcanoes Are So Hot Right Now
Werner Herzog's new Netflix documentary is the director's second film of 2016 to feature supervolcanoes.
Netflix
