Blaironit Excellent film with a gripping story!

FuzzyTagz If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Taha Avalos The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

tomgillespie2002 In 2001, teenagers Michael Perry and Jason Burkett were arrested and charged with a triple-homicide shortly after an intense shootout with the police. They were convicted of murdering 50-year old nurse Sandra Stotler, her sixteen year old son Adam, and his friend Jeremy Richardson. They shot and killed Sandra with a shotgun in her garage so they could steal her valuable red Camaro, and later murdered the two teenagers to obtain the keys to the gate of their middle-class community estate. As a result, Perry was sentenced to die by lethal injection, and Burkett was given a life sentence.Just how one culprit can be slated to die while the other gets to spend their life behind bars for the same crime is just one of the many questions raised in Werner Herzog's objective documentary on capital punishment. We meet Perry early on, child-like and God- fearing, just 8 days before he is due to die. During this meeting, Herzog reveals his own feelings about the death penalty (he's strictly against it) and even tells the inmate that he doesn't like him very much, but that he also respects everyone's humanity and point of view. The film is not a condemnation of Death Row, but a meditation, and Herzog simply sits back and allows the story to tell itself through interviews from all sides and sporadic narration.Although it does cover the crime itself in detail, Into the Abyss is not a re-investigation, but tells the story of the horrifying events back in 2001 juxtaposed with interviews from 2010 to allow us to make up our own mind and absorb the devastating affects such an act of brutality can cause. The most heart-breaking moment comes from the interview with Burkett's father, a prisoner himself, as he comes to terms with his own role in his son's fate. We learn of the events that attributed to his boy's character and eventual destiny, and wonder if society failed him. We then see how the crime left Sandra Stotler's daughter completely alone in life, and wonder why such a monster like Burkett should be allowed to live. You may find yourself discussing the topic in depth afterwards, but on hearing Perry's final words to the victim's families before he was given a lethal dose, I could not bring myself to believe that watching him die would ever bring them inner peace.

Cosmoeticadotcom This film lacks even the Herzogian touches that a flawed film like Cave Of Forgotten Dreams retains, if even poorly. On a side note, a quick Googling of the case shows that many of the claims made by people in the film- apart and aside from the two killers, is simply not true. Now, this may be Herzogian, if he actually knew the truths and allowed lies to be filmed, but, given the tenor of the film, and Herzog's anti-death penalty stance, it seems more likely to just be poor fact-checking.Herzog narrates the film, but the cinematography and music, by Peter Zeitlinger and Mark Degli Antoni, are not up to snuff. Again, very pedestrian, and one sense that Herzog almost feels as if he needs to get a film done, no matter what, including the quality. In the end, Perry fries, and Burkett survives, but the most important point comes from the daughter and sister of two of the victims, who describes the deep sense of peace and satisfaction she got from seeing the vile Perry bite the bullet, and her disappointment that Burkett and his then girlfriend (not seen in the film but at the scene of the crime) did not also get justice meted to them. It is to Herzog's credit as a man and an artist that he allows this sentiment to get out, despite his disagreement with it. Nonetheless, the whole film seems a pointless exercise, and Herzog accords it a similar energy.

tieman64 "Into the Abyss", a documentary by Werner Herzog, tells the tale of Michael James Perry and James Aaron Burkett, two teenagers responsible for murdering Texas housewife Sandra Stotler. They wanted the keys to her car. She lived in a gated community. They lived outside. The film's subtitled "A Tale of Death, a Tale of Life", partly because Perry was sentenced to death whilst Burkett was given life imprisonment, partly because Herzog is interested in how the social conditions of these two young men – their lives – resulted in them becoming avatars of death.Burkett's father, also serving a life sentence, is himself responsible for getting his son off the death penalty. He tells his son's jurors a sad tale in which he blames himself and his life decisions for essentially "forging" his son into a murderer. Herzog's film is similarly preoccupied with questions of social conditioning, determinism, free-will and indeterminism; how accountable are these two boys? The film is bookended by men of faith. It opens on Texan chaplain who accompanies prisoners to the lethal injection chair. Herzog surrounds the man with gravestones and unclaimed bodies. The film ends with the moving testimony of Fred Allen. A death row executioner, Fred resigned after 120 executions. He couldn't take the grim morbidity of it all. We later learn that Texas governor George Bush, America's favourite war criminal, executed a record breaking 152 men. Allen says he's learnt to live for the "dash" - that line between the birth and death dates on one's gravestone.Herzog interviews the killers. While he sympathises with them, he outright states to the camera that he doesn't like one; the kid's dangerous. Trust Herzog's instincts. Other interviews are conducted with family members and two relatives of Sarah. Interestingly, Burkett's girlfriend was inseminated by him whilst he was in jail. Herzog recognises her instantly as a death-row groupie. She's a hybristophiliac. A person who's sexually aroused and attracted to people who have committed cruel, gruesome crimes. Hybristophilia, a very rare paraphilia, occurs more frequently in women than men. Herzog picks up on certain traits right away, but avoids offending the woman. It's clear she has rescue fantasies, is delusional and is perhaps a narcissistic enabler, attracted to power or was perhaps abused in the past. Herzog doesn't pry. Hybristophiliacs are drawn to fame and notoriety. Biologists, using tests with monkeys, say some are attracted to the perceived masculinity of violence. Whatever the truth, like everyone else in "Abyss", this character hints at dark baggage.The film strongly resembles Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood", but is less focused, more shapeless and is ultimately one of Herzog weaker documentaries. It's largely a routine picture, but Herzog does finds some nice visuals here and there, like a brief shot of a tree growing up through an abandoned car; Nature finds a way, manages to penetrate everything, leaving behind wreckage. Other scenes are extremely touching. Consider one in which a chaplain likens the preciousness of life to the ease at which a squirrel may be run over by a car. One bad choice, one mistake, and life, so very fragile, quickly goes off the tracks. The "abyss" of the film's title conjures up a range of meanings. Perhaps it refers to the dark void of death, the horror of murder (state sanctioned or otherwise), the cavernous Texan execution chambers, or perhaps the tough, hopeless conditions of subterranean Texas, a breeding ground for crime. Elsewhere it's clear that Herzog is leading this documentary toward his very own, rigid aims. More fiction than documentary, Herzog has the ability to almost will or lead those he interviews into saying exactly what he wants. Observe early scenes in which Herzog speaks about unclaimed bodies and how effortlessly he gets characters to imply for him that social dysfunction perpetuates itself. It's an arrow aimed at the very God these Texans proudly adhere to: there is no "divinity" allowing these men to die, just men.With his distinct Bavarian drawl and incessant metaphysical musings, Herzog's long become a parody of himself. You've got to love him, though. This is a guy who manages to turn drunk penguins and dancing chickens into existential statements. In "Into the Abyss" he matter-of-factly looks at a prison chaplain and says "tell me about an encounter with a squirrel", as though this sentence is a perfectly ordinary. In Herzog's defence, such odd lines of enquiry are designed to tease out the absurd and do often lead interesting places. What emerges in "Into the Abyss" is less a condemnation of the death penalty than a condemnation of a society which engenders cross-generational suffering and breeds social dysfunction. Like the squirrel's food, it's all very nuts.7.9/10 - Very weak Herzog, but with 3 powerful sequences. Worth one viewing.

RShurtz57 I just watched a documentary by the masterful filmmaker, Werner Herzog, Into the Abyss. He does what a great filmmaker can do, change your perception of an issue. The film is not the most pleasant of subjects, a triple slaying of three people, and then the ensuing death by lethal injection of one of the two teenage murderers in the state of Texas. There are many reasons why I was so affected by the film, and I watch a lot of documentaries, the first being that I related so much to the two teenagers who did the killings.Herzog, the filmmaker, doesn't focus on the trial, rather, he focuses more on the anatomy of the crime, and the way in which each of the characters were affected. He has an amazing sense of place, just as he did with Grizzly Man,he puts the viewer directly into the film by establishing a feel of the surroundings, patiently filming poignant parts of the town where these people where from , so that one can really understand that this could be your neighborhood, your friend, your acquaintance, or even members of your own family. His interview style is unwavering and fearless, in fact, each of these people you felt trusted him completely, from the daughter whose mother was killed, to the father of one of the killers. Even the sheriff who investigated the crime ten years before, had none of the resistance that law enforcement can sometimes have in an interview like this. I'm remiss in not mentioning the interview of the Captain of the team that carried out so many of the executions in Texas, sometimes two a week, until he resigned after the execution of Karla Rae Tucker, the first woman to be executed in Texas since the Civil War. His testimony was powerful, coming from this huge man with the Texas accent, who was changed by that particular execution, and changed his view on capitol punishment, and this after doing it for ten years. He claims the execution of Karla Rae Tucker caused him an introduction to his real self, and as he says near the end of the film, "No one has the right to take another person's life, no matter the circumstances."In Werner Herzog's film, he doesn't excuse the crimes that they committed, but he does cause the viewer to look and think about the great mountain of destruction that was built even before these two teen killers were born. The one tried to take care of the other one, by taking him in to live with him in a camper. Before that, the boy was living in the trunk of an abandoned car. I think that was what was impressive about the film, that Werner Herzog gave something to this whole situation, and not just to the young man who would die eight days later, but to everyone involved. He gave the other boy's father a chance to seek some kind of redemption, and fight for his son's life, even when he had taken lives himself.The film made me think of the fragile circumstances that exist for so many kids growing up between a life in prison or on death row. Sometimes, it requires the risky intervention on the part of someone who is actually living Christian principles instead of talking about them.Herzog is a patient filmmaker. Even the long shots that he chooses too edit into the film are packed full of sub-text. One has to stay open and un-affected by the usual techniques of filmmaking, depending on quick edits and short sound bites. Herzog is a master, and if one is willing to trust him completely, the pay-off is extraordinary.