It is hard to take your eyes off the fire that burns deep under our feet.
It's saying something that a documentary about volcanologists -- i.e. scientists who study active volcanoes, which necessitates getting as close to them as possible -- is well-trodden ground for Werner Herzog. He admits as much early on in Into the Inferno by including footage and outtakes from 2007's Encounters at the End of the World of his visit with a group of scientists studying a volcano in Antarctica. One of them was Clive Oppenheimer from Cambridge University, who went on to be the main human subject of this film and Herzog's guide to some of the most dangerous places in the world. (Of course, as Oppenheimer rightly points out, he's no stranger to that sort of thing having made a short documentary -- 1977's La Soufrière -- about the forced evacuation of an island where the local volcano could blow its top at any time.)
Over the course of Into the Inferno's 104 minutes, Herzog and Oppenheimer travel from a tiny volcanic island in the South Pacific to Indonesia (home to the most volcanoes in the world, including one that erupts while they're filming it) to Ethiopia (the hottest place on the planet, where a team of archaeologists is piecing together the fossilized remains of a man who lived tens of thousands of years ago) to Iceland (not the hottest place on the planet) to North Korea (where Herzog laments that everything they film has been explicitly staged for them) and back to the same archipelago in the Pacific Ocean. "Obviously," Herzog's narration goes, "there was a scientific side to our journey, but what we were really chasing was the magical side. The demons, the new gods." These he finds in Indonesia's "Chicken Church" (a structure built on the site of a Catholic church that, yes, looks like a chicken), at the foot of a long-dormant volcano that has been incorporated into North Korea's propaganda machine, and among the tribesmen who worship the volcanoes on their islands -- or John Frum, the American G.I. who supposedly lives in one. The most awe-inspiring moments, though, are the shots of the roiling magma and flowing lava. Those, for lack of a better term, are the money shots, and Herzog uses them sparingly. No need to overdo it on the awesome power of nature at its most basic level.