Fireball: Visitors From Darker Worlds Review: A Documentary About Out of This World Objects

Release date: November 13, 2020
Running time: 100 minutes

Following their Academy Award-nominated work on “Encounters at the End of the World” and Emmy-nominated “Into the Inferno,” Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer’s new film “Fireball: Visitors From Darker Worlds” takes viewers on an extraordinary journey to discover how shooting stars, meteorites and deep impacts have focused the human imagination on other realms and worlds, and on our past and our future.

Fireball explores meteorites and other objects that come from space and looks at how people find them, what those objects look like, and also the historical perspective of how those objects have affected people and cultures.  The historical aspect is very interesting, looking at how objects from space have been noticed by cultures and developed into myths for generations.  And the filmmakers really explore these, going to many different locales in their search for more and more history.  And they're not just looking for historical examples, but also go all over the world in their search for out of this world objects.  If you want to see some really interesting places and footage from all over, this is a great way to do it.  And I also enjoyed how the filmmakers spoke to various interstellar object hunters and looked into how they go about locating their objects and some of their best finds.  I really liked a clever individual who found the most likely place for space material to hit and goes there regularly trying to find anything that might have accumulated there.  

However, Fireball--while being an interesting and insightful documentary--is relatively slow paced.  It goes to a lot of places but sometimes it seems like it lingers a little too long on points.  And this is just a personal opinion, but the narration felt a little too serious at times.  It made it hard to really get invested in the film and also made the sections that lingered on feel that much longer.  It is probably just me personally, but if it is something that did affect my overall enjoyment of the documentary.

Fireball: Visitors From Darker Worlds travels all over the world looking for out of this world objects and the myths and effect that those have on our world.

Rent it.

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Fireball: Visitors From Darker Worlds is available to stream on Apple TV+ starting November 13.