There is a stock joke/thought that is overused when we talk about Morgan Freeman talking–”That man should narrate my life. Like hearing the voice of God.” But while Freeman’s god-narration can tell us that Penguins are Marching and It Is Beautiful, narration by filmmaker Werner Herzog would tell us that Penguins are Questioning Their Mortality to the Extent That They’re Already Dead, and that Looking Into the Eyes of a Penguin is like Gazing into the Vast Abyss of Time.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams, the first real 3D documentary film of note, finds Herzog mining for both metaphors and the origins of human creativity in a cavern in southern France.

The man has made more than 40 films, but the Chauvet cave is one of the more perfect vessels he’s used to inject with his musings–It houses the earliest existing examples of cave art–32,000 years old. And in this case, “vessel” is literal–with the 3D, this cave has a spatial feel that he couldn’t have done any other way. But Herzog doesn’t poke us in the face with gimmicky 3D objects flying out of the screen, he burrows into it, revealing hundreds of images. He talks to just the right intelligent people about just the right things–their insights and his build flesh-and-blood prehistoric artists with only dusty paint-daubed cave walls as materials for construction.

But for something exploring laughably-huge questions like “What is human-ness?”, Cave never feels preachy or stale. While Herzog’s crazed quest for allegories and metaphors for human progress is sometimes hilariously overreaching (something about albino crocodiles and a nuclear power plant), he never falls into the trap of lapsing into Freeman-style, unnecessary broad strokes. When he’s not hypothesizing and provoking, he falls silent and lets us vibe (with operatic voices as a soundtrack) to the work of artists so old they may not have been entirely Sapiens yet.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams opens tomorrow night at the IFC Center and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas.