The title of Werner Herzog's latest documentary, “Encounters at the End of the World,” is meant to be taken literally. Not just because it's about life – human and otherwise – in Antarctica (where there's nothing south of south), but also because in Herzog's view, humanity's days are numbered.

Werner Herzog has a history of making films that pit man against nature, from "Fitzcarraldo" in 1982 to 2005's "Grizzly Man." With his latest documentary, "Encounters at the End of the World," the German filmmaker looks at life in Antarctica among the humans that live at McMurdo Station.

“Nature will regulate us,” he says, ominously.

If so, Herzog intends we go out chuckling. Or at least smiling ironically.

Over a career spanning more than four decades, Herzog has produced an astonishingly diverse and diverting body of work, from feature films like 1982's “Fitzcarraldo,” about an opera-loving Irish rubber baron's attempt to haul a 320-ton steamship over a Peruvian mountain, to his 2005 documentary “Grizzly Man,” the story of bear enthusiast Timothy Treadwell, who, with his girlfriend, was attacked, killed and partially eaten by one or more grizzlies in 2003.

There's nothing so grisly here. “Encounters” consists of loosely connected images and stories collected during a visit by Herzog to McMurdo Station, a 1,000-person U.S. research outpost at the South Pole.

CLOSE 'ENCOUNTERS' OF THE ODD KIND Antarctica's a peculiar place with peculiar people – and Werner Herzog fit right in “Encounters at the End of the World” Rating: G When: Opens tomorrow Running time: 1 hr., 39 min.

True to his public persona as nihilist crank, Herzog declares up front that he won't indulge in any talk about cute, fluffy penguins. He'll march in a different direction, focusing instead upon the continent's quirkier human inhabitants, from a research linguist “on a continent without languages,” to a plumber of claimed royal Aztec descent to a contortionist-biologist who once drove a garbage truck from London to Nairobi.

It's all very odd stuff, but then Antarctica is an odd place that apparently attracts odd people. And odd German film directors. Herzog delights in surprises, often by posing unexpected questions. To a penguin researcher, he asks about homosexuality among the birds – or cases of insanity.

“Could they just go crazy because they've had enough of their colony?” he wonders.

There are other wonders. While McMurdo Station resembles nothing so much as “an ugly mining town,” Herzog finds grace and beauty beneath the ice in the strange creatures that dwell in a sea of ethereal light.

For these animals, the natural, nonhuman inhabitants of Antarctica, Herzog expresses only awe and amazement. Antarctica, he suggests, should have been left to them, a “blank, white spot on the map” unexplored by humans. People shouldn't be here.

But they did. And Herzog followed.