Film Notes: Until the End of the World

German filmmaker Wim Wenders made his bones in the early ‘70s with a loose trilogy of road movies, contrasting the wanderings of alienated characters with epic visual language. Following a remarkable ‘80s run that yielded two major awards at the Cannes Film Festival—Palme D’or for Paris, Texas (1984) and Best Director for Wings of Desire (1987)—Wenders cashed in his auteur chips on a self-described “ultimate road movie” with a budget larger than all his earlier films combined.

Released in 1991, Until the End of the World failed both critically and commercially, the victim of contractually obligated edits that reduced its expansive narrative to Cliff’s Notes. But Wenders and editor Peter Przygodda kept a copy of the film negative, and in the ensuing years were able to craft the definitive director’s cut released in 2015. 

Clocking in at a butt-numbing 287 minutes, the unabridged World follows a love triangle against a backdrop of apocalyptic paranoia in the year 1999. Free-spirited Claire (Wings of Desire’s Solveig Dommartin, who also co-wrote the story), reeling in the wake of her husband’s affair, hooks up with a globe-trotting spy named Sam, played by William Hurt with his usual forehead-glistening intensity. Sam is on the run from the CIA, in possession of a stolen top-secret device that can record signals directly from the brain and allow the blind to see.  Meanwhile, a nuclear-powered satellite falls out of orbit, circling perilously close to Earth.

Along the way, Sam’s stolen “dream machine” becomes a dark metaphor for the unforeseen implications of technological innovation.  As one character puts it, “It can suck out our dreams and look at them like television," an uncanny inverse of how we pour our dreams into our devices today in an attempt to give them meaning.

Indeed, the film offers some remarkably accurate predictions of the technology we take for granted today.  Early in the film, Claire’s GPS-equipped car scolds her for driving over the speed limit. Private eyes use a proto-app called “Bounty Bear” to track their target’s digital footprints.  People literally go blind from overdoing screen time. 

Claire’s husband Eugene (Sam Neill), a novelist by trade, narrates the film as he crafts its events into his new book, intoning language that could be part of a modern think piece on social media: 

"They wandered in and out of lost worlds... their dreams became black holes of isolation... they suffered finally from a complete loss of reality."

Wenders’ characters eventually fall prey to their dream machines, peering blankly into the screens as they spiral deeper into the dark, deep end of nostalgia. The conflict between the human soul and its unwieldy creations is crystallized in a few passing lines of dialogue between Claire and Sam’s emotionally remote father, the inventor of the device:

“It will eat us up alive. We should stop it."
"How could we stop it? It's all we've ever wanted!"

It seems almost perverse that a filmmaker with such a unique visual sensibility would make a film about "the disease of images." Wenders includes his trademark tableaux of tiny humans dwarfed by immense, unforgiving landscapes, but more intriguingly, he employs early high-definition video technology to render the machine’s addictive visual palette. The eye-popping pixillucinations representing the characters’ interior dreamworlds appear uniquely cursed thirty years later, surfacing out of some long dark night of the doomscroll.

A romantic post-apocalyptic sci-fi whatsit as grand and unwieldy as its title, Until the End of the World presents a singular cinematic experience for the age of binge-streaming. Rest assured, if you find the runtime intimidating, we hear you. But this film is guaranteed to hit differently in a cathedral of cinema like the Paramount compared to one's living room. Remove all distractions and tap in.

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