Sometimes I secretly wish Werner Herzog narrated all movies. Hell, I’d go see that new Transformers assault if it had running commentary from Herzog. (“And then the being that began as a motorcar undergoes a metamorphosis. He is now a mechanical man.”) Amusing as that notion is, there are films that are especially suited to Herzog’s voice, that seemingly couldn’t or shouldn’t exist without him. If there’s any filmmaker who deserves to take a camera into a cave that includes the oldest known man-made paintings in the world and carefully explain their cryptic beauty and import, it’s Herzog.

I think of Herzog, perhaps reductively, as a creator with a boundless fascination for the power and resiliency of the natural world, especially as it intersects with the careless, tragically misguided intrusions of mankind. Some see the forest, some see the trees. Herzog sees the overlapping microcosmos and macrocosmos of living beings in a grotesquely beautifully ballet that makes the craziest moments of Black Swan look as benign as a bunch of kids dancing the Hokey Pokey. If any filmmaker’s lifelong mission centers on trying to make the pictures on the screen match up with those in his head, it seems reasonable to speculate that Herzog faces a taller order than most.

His new documentary, The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, gives the director unprecedented access to the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave, which was first discovered in 1994. The inner walls are home to drawings that were made tens of thousands of years ago. Given the unique nature of the cave and the apparent lack of traffic over the intervening span of time, the drawing are beautifully preserved, making them uncommonly valuable dispatches from a distant era. In consideration of this, access to the cavern has been limited to a select few and metal walkways have been installed to prevent individuals from venturing where they should not, as it was for the time travelers in Rad Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder,” although, in this instance, the goal is to preserve the past instead of the fragile future.

As long as Herzog is focused on the cave, the film is fascinating. The natural reverence that its otherworldly yet purely human beauty inspires is distinctly compounded by Herzog’s hushed approach. This is his cathedral and he treats it accordingly. Focus, however, is not Herzog’s strong suit. He has an expansive, wavering train of thought and he’s true to himself in the construction of his films, letting them ramble right off the track. When Herzog gives over time to scholars expounding on fertility statues or prehistoric weaponry, the purely peripheral connection to the films main topic becomes problematic. The more the film strays, the more the need to get back inside the cave grows.

Herzog didn’t just take cameras into the cave, he took 3D cameras into the cave. While the recent Hollywood obsession with repurposing every form of storytelling to extract an extra few bucks out of moviegoers by renting them magic Ray-Bans has been tiresome and, at times, almost embarassing, Cave of Forgotten Dreams is one of those rare films where the 3D is not just beneficial, but absolutely vital. One of the most amazing things about the cave drawing is the way they wrap around jutting rock and drain into crevasses. The textures and layers of the wall are part of the art, and there are instances when it seems that the original creators were shaping the story of the work, almost creating a primitive sort of motion picture, by the way they chose to array the images on the wall. There is fascination and beauty to the drawings when seen in flat photographs, but they are striking in their tactile grandeur when seen with the proper depth and dimension. Occasionally, Herzog’s choices as a filmmaker can be baffling, but not in this instance. It may be the closest he’ll ever come to getting the audience to see what he sees.