A documentary by Werner Herzog. Rated G. Opens Friday, July 4, at the Ridge Theatre

From the Amazonian jungle to Kuwait’s burning oil fields, the planet’s wildest frontiers have always attracted filmmaker Werner Herzog. So it makes sense that he should now venture to the most extreme place on Earth: Antarctica.

In his first documentary since 2005’s Grizzly Man, the German auteur reveals the surreal world of the South Pole with his unique (and sometimes self-indulgent) meld of philosophical insights, stunning camerawork, and off-kilter interviews. Herzog has made a career out of films that centre on man versus nature, but the drawback here is that there isn’t a compelling central figure, like, say, Grizzly Man’s troubled idealist, Timothy Treadwell. Instead, we get a collection of interviews with some oddball “professional dreamers” who inhabit the bottom of the world: a diver-biologist who loves ’50s science-fiction flicks, and a researcher whose party trick is to zip herself into a carryon bag.

The larger problem Herzog faces is that his headquarters, McMurdo Station, is as banal as any mining town. He makes up for that, though, when he heads out to capture surreal scenes in wide-angle detail. A huge, diaphanous observation balloon inflates over an ice field. A jellyfish undulates past the luminescent walls of an iceberg. A giant volcano spews smoke out of its snowy mouth.

What keeps it all from becoming IMAX material is Herzog’s acerbic narration. When he isn’t expressing disdain for tree huggers, yoga classes, and the 24-hour sunshine, the man who remade Nosferatu is making grim reference to our impending self-destruction. Antarctica is, after all, one of the bellwethers for our ever-warming Earth.

One of the film’s running jokes is that Herzog refuses to make a penguin movie, but when he finally focuses on the species, it’s on a deranged bird that’s wobbling off on its own toward certain death. If his wandering, dry-witted postcard from the edge has any message, it’s that humankind is as doomed as that penguin.