Just what are you doing here anyway, eh?
Considering how it started, I find it highly appropriate that I chose this weekend to finally get around to seeing Werner Herzog's 1984 film Where the Green Ants Dream, especially as it concerns a standoff between a tribe of Aborigines and an Australian mining company intent on surveying its ancestral land. Bruce Spence (a familiar face from George Miller's Mad Max films) plays the geologist conducting the tests who finds himself on the front line of the conflict when the tribe, led by elders Wandjuk Marika (who also provides the didgeridoo music that is heard throughout) and Roy Marika, refuses to step aside. Things nearly turn deadly when hotheaded (and uncomfortably racist) foreman Ray Barrett threatens to run them over with a bulldozer, requiring the immediate intervention of company vice president Norman Kaye, and the whole thing winds up in the courts, where things play out in a most unusual fashion.
Of course, things playing out in an unusual fashion is far from unusual for Herzog. Take for example the subplot about a dotty old lady (Colleen Clifford) who enlists Spence's help in locating her lost dog (as if he doesn't have enough other things on his plate). Or Spence's musings about the theory of curved space, which are less out of place than you would expect. Then there is the turning point when the tribal elders come to the city to meet with Kaye (and wind up getting stuck in the lift twice, which goes to show the limits of civilization), and upon seeing a green military aircraft ask that it be delivered to them. This isn't the quick fix that the company hopes it will be, though, even after they go to the trouble of constructing a runway for it. For one thing, they probably didn't consider what the Aborigines would want to do with it when they got it.