Werner Herzog’s Exit From Civilization

With his latest work, a novel called The Twilight World, the filmmaker Werner Herzog has chosen a subject so tailor-made for him that it verges on self-parody. In a cinematic oeuvre devoted to questing megalomaniacs and half-bestial outcasts, it seems inevitable that he would eventually find his way to Hiroo Onoda, most famous of the so-called “Japanese holdouts” after the Second World War—that is, soldiers stranded on islands that were bypassed by the US military in its advance across the Pacific, who refused to surrender for years or even decades after the conflict’s end.