No roads may lead to Antarctica, but all longitude lines do. It’s these lines that the continent’s few residents have followed, from wherever they started, to their shared terminus at the bottom of the planet, stepping, as one resident puts it, “off the edge of the map.” Werner Herzog has made a career out of films based on characters on the margins. Some are real, some are imagined, but nearly all of them are obsessives with tenuous grips on sanity and singular fascinations with often fantastical quests. It is inevitable, then, that Herzog’s career would end up taking him to a continent where nearly every inhabitant is the potential star of a Herzog film. Where every character has quite intentionally gone to the margins and then over it.

The “end of the world” in the film’s title has two meanings. This is what Herzog calls Antarctica, but in a less (or more?) literal sense, the subject of the film is the ultimate sustainability of humanity. Antarctica is a true frontier, the largest place on the earth’s surface where humanity hasn’t really established dominance. In the face of this awesome and largely untouched nature, and the scientists who study it, the director’s look at the continent is often a meditation on the insignificance of humans in the face of the awesome power of nature. For all the talk of global warming (and, this being a place where the symptoms can be seen most clearly, there’s a lot of talk of it), Herzog’s film stresses how easily it is for small events on the geological scale to have major impacts on the course of human life. The subtext, which bubbles to the surface in amusing fashion when Herzog films a team of biologists kicking back to enjoy a screening of the sci-fi environmental disaster flick Them!, is that when the earth decides to take its revenge, it won’t be pretty.