Grumbles and gripes have filtered through the film world since “Encounters at the End of the World,” Werner Herzog’s latest adventure into extremity, made its premiere last fall at the Telluride Film Festival. By all accounts, this remarkably average, grumpily narrated chronicle of an Antarctic research outpost seemed to suggest that Mr. Herzog was aging into a crank who simply happened to have access to better nature footage than the rest of us.

But rather than a curmudgeon or a coot, “Encounters at the End of the World,” which begins a two-week engagement at Film Forum tomorrow, presents a man at risk of streamlining himself into a brand. Mr. Herzog’s visit with the motley community at McMurdo Station, an Antarctic research center located on the shore of McMurdo Sound, 2,200 miles south of New Zealand, produces, sadly, what we have come to expect: He grinds through German-accented pronouncements of the folly of taming the wild or plumbing the infinite; he parades and interrogates God’s lonely men and women, and he climaxes the show with National Geographic spectacle and eerie world music.

Mr. Herzog does all these things, hauling with him a marine biologist who hunts new species, an Eastern Bloc escapee who still packs a go bag, and a handyman with Aztec lineage. He also plunges us down into the blue “cathedral” of the frigid deep. And yet the effort feels flat — comparatively routine from the director of “Grizzly Man” and “Lessons of Darkness,” though not wholly out of place for the Discovery Channel, which produced the film.

“Encounters” lacks the profundity and the sublime impact of the director’s other work. This is one Herzog film in which his famed voice-over simply isn’t the most intriguing take on the images. The strongest part of the anecdotal sketch comes from the particular brand of hard-to-categorize thinkers, drifters, and dreamers who end up at the bottom of the world, and their patient responses to Mr. Herzog’s grumpy questioning.

When Mr. Herzog cuts people short with a fast edit or a voice-over put-down, it can be amusing. But instead of injecting insight, it feels as if he is delivering his uncompromising persona as expected, landing just a few steps away from self-parody. The opining starts early, with a brief diatribe against the “abominations” that, in his eyes, soften up McMurdo, such as the ATMs and yoga classes. Instead of inspiring and challenging us, Mr. Herzog’s vision of nature and human endeavor here feels fogyish and unfocused.

The raison d’être for “Encounters,” according to the director, was some extraordinary undersea footage shot by a friend and “expert diver,” the experimental musician Henry Kaiser (unnamed here but perhaps ripe for a documentary himself). These fantastical journeys to the flip side of the ice floor are the film’s climax, but they are drowned in an insistent tide of mystical world music about as subtle as a laser show.

It also doesn’t help that Mr. Herzog unveiled better samples from the same pool of footage to greater effect in 2005’s “The Wild Blue Yonder.” That “science-fiction” film, which took the form of an embittered monologue by an extraterrestrial illustrated with documentary footage and interviews, may not have cohered well either, but its exercise in reappropriation was more adventuresome.

Mr. Herzog has fruitfully revisited his own chosen material before: Last year, his “Rescue Dawn” dramatized the Vietnam War escape of the German-American pilot Dieter Dengler, the subject of his 1997 documentary “Little Dieter Needs To Fly.” Nor does “Encounters” provide grounds for any meaningful accusation that Mr. Herzog has “sold out” — the Discovery Channel, after all, also produced “Grizzly Man.”

But this latest film, which bears a dedication to a movie reviewer, does feel like the subpar work of someone cruising on his reputation. Mr. Herzog’s renown and experience are still potent and valuable (witness his “W”-stamped films that accompanied Film Forum’s Herzog retrospective last spring). And this is still a man who dragged a ship across the Andes (for “Fitzcarraldo”), and once continued an interview after getting shot, like a Teutonic Teddy Roosevelt. But that’s all the more reason why it’s a little dismaying to see him here wasting breath, more than once, on dissing the waddling target of “March of the Penguins.”

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