In the aftermath of the Gulf War, retreating Iraqi soldiers left the oil fields of Kuwait a raging inferno. True to form as perhaps the world's most death-defying filmmaker, Werner Herzog and a small camera crew arrived on the scene to film the carnage. What resulted was Lessons of Darkness - less a simple documentary about an environmental catastrophe than it is an apocalyptic vision of hell, Herzog has created a science fiction film, in which our planet vanishes beneath pillars of flame, oceans of oil, and impenetrable clouds of smoke.