Werner Herzog makes documentaries that feel as outlandish as fiction, and fiction films that can feel as intense and immediate as lived reality. Ever attracted to the extremes of human behavior and natural landscape, he tirelessly stages ecstatic encounters with the all-consuming infinite, often at the frayed edge of madness.

With “The Wild Blue Yonder,” opening tonight for a week-long run at the IFC Center, the filmmaker tries a new way of transforming our world into something strange and wondrous. Working with found footage of space shuttle labs and ocean depths, he patches together the memoir of a space oddity: the rueful ruminations of a homesick alien, musing over his civilization.

No CGI monsters and laser battles here: Mr. Herzog may call his work a “science fiction fantasy,” but his understanding of the phrase is as particular as the director. The “alien” from Andromeda is a scruffy, ordinary-looking man played by the go-to guy for creepy fervor, Brad Dourif. He speechifies about lost worlds, Roswell, and future journeys, while standing at a deserted crossroads and other roadside badlands. These scenes bookend dreamy clips from an extraordinary underwater Antarctic expedition and other archival sources. The alien’s narration reinvents these exotic locales, as do shots from his home planet and from Roswell-inspired search missions for other life forms.

“Wild Blue Yonder” is therefore another twist on the director’s customary methods. His 1970s epics, like “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” (now playing at Film Forum) were staged at land’s and wit’s end, and his documentaries (“Grizzly Man”) journey to the same extremes. But here Mr. Herzog is mostly laying his fictional veneer over someone else’s footage, which lends a loose, free-floating feel to the endeavor.

Thanks to this collage approach, “Wild Blue Yonder” can get a little inscrutable. The unmoored work has little drive besides the alien’s improvised history lesson and the stirring images. Mr. Dourif’s “alien” endlessly bemoans the missteps of his fellow aliens in settling Earth and rhapsodizes about an expedition to their home planet. Stuffed somewhere in his pronouncements are some freshly filmed interludes with CalTech physicists who explain astronomical concepts or, occasionally, just sit for the camera.

The most powerful strain in these images is an obscure regret. In the footage from an 1989 NASA shuttle mission, astronauts in casual shorts floating around a cramped space lab evoke long-gone memories and lost potential. Undersea creatures, Earth’s evolutionary oddities here recast as alien fauna, represent the wormhole not taken. The burden of dreams: so went the title of an actual documentary about Mr. Herzog’s film “Fitzcarraldo.”

It’s easy to see Mr. Dourif’s space orphan as the director’s proxy. Mr. Herzog has essentially put his own indomitable philosophical voice, so intrusive (but welcome) in his documentaries, into the mouth of a fictive figure. The overriding message beamed to us from Mr. Herzog’s orbit is again man’s (or alien’s) folly before the infinite, tinged with an outcast’s wonder and elaborately articulated. Chapter headings divide the film into typically ambitious topics: “The Death of a Dream” or “The Tunnel of Time.”

The ambient noise of Mr. Herzog’s grandiose presence comes through in the score’s pastiche of world music. Deployed in the service of extraterrestrial atmosphere are a Dutch cellist and a Senegalese singer, Mola Sylla, harmonizing with a choir of five Sardinian shepherds. Mr. Sylla’s throaty drone, difficult to place and yet well-suited, seems to resound in the film’s otherworldly locales.

But the music also draws attention to a certain hollowness in the film. Mr. Herzog’s orchestration of the exotic, epitomized by his world-music all-stars, sometimes creates results that are immersive without being entirely meaningful. The interplanetary conceit of the film can just as easily feel belabored as playful, and the hinted-at Great Void can seem vapid instead of awesome. The idea of the undersea as otherworldly, incidentally, also has limited power since it’s the tone struck by innumerable nature documentaries (though admittedly not as literally as in this film).

Some of this might be due to Mr. Dourif’s alien. It sounds absurd to suggest something that might comprise an effective character in a movie as abstract as this one, but Mr. Dourif’s petulant performance is sometimes funny but not compelling. Perhaps the director’s previous films spoil one with the director’s muscular German accent, which delivers any phrase in the English language with a riveting finality.

Asking the same urgency of “Wild Blue Yonder” may be to underappreciate the film’s oceanic rhythms. Not every trove of found footage will feature a rabid naturalist like Timothy Treadwell (the subject of “Grizzly Man”) hobnobbing with 800-pound bears and sweet-talking them out of their one purpose as carnivores. For all the Andromedan’s sputtering, the film may be closer in spirit to the relaxed mode of “Wheel of Time,” Mr. Herzog’s 2005 documentary about Tibetan Buddhism.

The leap of faith, which a Werner Herzog film ordinarily fosters and even performs, feels naggingly obligatory. The consummate explorer of psychic and geographical terrain clearly seeks a way to reach for the stars, and the results are not quite so ecstatic or insightful as one might expect. Nevertheless, “Wild Blue Yonder” is worth a look, mainly for the director’s experimentation, or even for a late-afternoon dip into dippiness.