Shot in documentary style from the perspective of an almost alien observer, the film is an exploration of the ravaged oil fields of post-Gulf War Kuwait, decontextualised and characterised in such a way as to emphasise the terrain's cataclysmic strangeness. An effective companion to his earlier film FATA MORGANA (1971), Herzog again perceives the desert as a landscape with its own voice. The film is a meditation on catastrophe, contextualised through the literary modes of religion and science fiction.