Crashing into our feeds at the end of last week was the trailer for Werner Herzog’s hotly-anticipated new doc for Apple TV+, Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds, in which the legendary German auteur presents a study on meteorites with his signature plodding poetry.

Set for release on November 13, the documentary paints a dramatic image of enormous slabs of rock, hurtling through space at untold speeds, each with the capacity for full-blown Armageddon. These meteorites are at the centre of Herzog’s story, where they are presented as timeless and universal subjects of human imagination and story telling.

The production, which builds on a growing and impressive list of documentaries headed by Apple’s new streaming service (see: Boys State), is in many ways a continuation of Herzog’s lifelong interest in the natural sublime and humanity’s relation to it. From Fitzcarraldo (1982) to Grizzly Man (2005), Herzog has investigated this intersection from multiple vantage-points, zeroing in on the primal and profound.

“Each one of these stones from darker worlds has its own story, and the bigger ones have changed entire landscapes,” says Herzog in the trailer. “We do not know what in the future is coming for us, but untold numbers of these voyagers from afar are still on the way.”

Fireball sees the director reunite with volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer, with whom he previously worked for Encounters at the End of the World, a 2007 documentary on research in the Antarctic, and Into the Inferno, the pair’s 2016 documentary in which they visited volcanoes around the word. .

Watch Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds on Apple TV+ on November 13.