Until the End of the World (1991)

 Until the End of the World (1991)

Directed by Wim Wenders

Written by Wim Wenders, Solveig Dommartin, Peter Carey, Michael Almereyda

These are the impressions after watching the 4hr 47min version of the movie. Not in one sitting, but over 20 hours. 

Claire, played by Solveig Dommartin, is a bit at loose ends at the start of it. Well, everyone is at loose ends, the world is. We are told via voiceover that there is a Indian nuclear bomb carrying satellite, up there somewhere, that has gone off course and no telling where it will come down and presumably end the world. So the movie is conceptually rather far fetched and it never backs down from that, rather goes further into areas where it is hard to suspend disbelief or care about the characters.
 

It toys with elements of old Hollywood studio movies. This seems to be a thing with Euro directors of a certain generation. There is a man played by William Hurt who has stolen a head-mounted eye wear brainwave reading device. It’s supposed to let blind people see. 

Clare falls in love with him, loses track of him, and chases around the globe to find him. Then she chases around with him because he is wanted by the CIA for the stolen tech thing.
Her old lover, Sam Neill, chases them around and they all end up in Australia after a couple hours of this with the soft boiled Berlin detective she had hired earlier to find Hurt. The detective wears really nice ties and vests and plays the harmonica. Kind of noir-lite.
Claire’s old boyfriend, Sam Neill, eventually writes a novel and this is the text of the occasional narration from the beginning of it all. There is also a heart of gold bank robber who is also a drummer. His stolen money has financed her globe trotting and chasing of Hurt after the cute meet of running into the bank robber and his partner quite literally in a car accident in the very beginning.
 

(Spoiler alert!!!)

Max von Sydow and Jeanne Moreau are Hurt’s elderly parents, she’s blind and needs the eye thingy which the old man developed and stole from whoever he worked for. The CIA is after him too. But he is a brilliant scientist and continues his work in hiding in a huge cave in Australia that seems to be tricked out with millions of dollars worth of scientific gear and computers which somehow he got out there. It all works because of Claire’s ability to concentrate and blind Jeanne Moreau sees a recording of her daughter and granddaughter. Soon after she dies, being old and stuff. 

Since we have got more movie time and film and money to go through, bored science tech genius von Sydow decides to use his thingy to record people’s dreams instead. All the aboriginal peeps who have been assisting him decide to skedaddle. They were probably the people he got to lug all that crap to the cave. It's one thing making the blind see crappy pixelated videos of their loved ones but the dream recording stuff is the limit. You have to draw the line somewhere. 

Max von Sydow succeeds with this dream recording and Claire and his son Hurt become addicted to carrying around pixelated recordings of their dreams stored in handheld video devices. These are so compelling that they no longer stop and smell the roses or go out to play. 

This is all preposterous because dreams are much more than images. Dreams are what? They are thoughts, emotions, memories, a mixed bag of brain data, not just pictures. No one really knows what they are. But this is a movie and movie makers like to think to themselves as Dream Makers, the Hollywood studios have been called Dream Factories. At any rate it was unbelievable that dreams could be recorded as only video images. 

Anyway it is all kind of a metaphor because Sam Neill is not a dream addict and has spent this time finishing his novel which is all about Claire’s adventures and includes everyone else in the movie. He instantly cures Claire’s dream vid addiction by having her read the novel. That's believable because the novel has to be more interesting than the dream videos and probably this movie too. So what is Wenders trying to tell us here? Forget the movies, his business and go read. It kind of seems like that. Maybe he should have just written it as a novel, skipped the movie, and pocketed the $20 million budget.

Oh yeah and the bomb goes off somewhere in December 1999, the year in which the entire movie is set. It messes up all their digital devices but unfortunately is not the end of the world or the movie. The movie, made in 1990 and 91, then sort of foresees that millennial end of the world when Y2K was supposed to screw up all the computers including those that run nuclear power plants and bring about a sort of end of the world. Never happened. (Maybe some future end of the world will be more successful, global warming?)

The style of the movie is mixed but more indie than big budget Hollywood sci fi. There are some nifty cars here and there. But it’s all a bit ragtag including a horrible off the cuff sort of improv scene that wasted an hour and a half of fine actor Allen Garfield’s day with him playing a used car salesman. That was irritating. He is way better in a rather good Wenders movie from 1982, The State of Things. His bit in this was just a waste and badly done.