Film Review: Until the End of the World (1991)

Well, it’s my fiftieth review on this blog, and for this milestone, I thought we would finally get around to that other Wim Wenders film I mentioned back in the Wings of Desire post. I think it makes for an appropriate milestone entry, if for nothing else than the fact that it’s a beast of a film. At a runtime of nearly five hours, this is not a movie to be watched in one sitting without intermission. I do think it is an interesting film, and more so an interesting experience, but a running like that is probably going to test many viewers, especially those that might not find the film to need that sort of length. However, before I get into my views on the film, and whether or not I would agree with these folks, I’ll give you a hopefully reasonable rundown of the story, though it might be a bit tricky, as you’d imagine.

The story follows Claire, a woman who’s been trying to get away from the fallout of her last relationship. Basically, her boyfriend, a writer named Eugene, slept with her best friend, and Claire has been traveling around Europe aimlessly in the wake of it all. One day, after turning off a gridlocked highway, Claire crashes into another car, which happens to contain two bank robbers who’ve just completed a heist. The two are actually rather decent, especially Chico, and they end up enlisting her to take the money to Paris, allowing her to take a cut of it as payment. She agrees and sets off. At a stop, she runs into a man named Trevor McPhee, who is apparently on the run from the law and asks her to take him along on her journey, which she also agrees to. The two seem to have a decent time together, but when she arrives in Paris, and more specifically Eugene’s apartment, she figures out that Trevor stole some of the money. She becomes determined to find him herself and settle things, which Eugene disapproves of, knowing how impulsive and self-destructive she can be. Still, she heads out and hires a missing-persons investigator in Berlin (where Trevor was going) to help her. They determine that he’s now heading to Lisbon, and that he’s wanted for opal theft from an Australian mining company. They manage to find him, and Winters handcuffs Claire and Trevor together so that he can’t get away. However, this method backfires when Claire runs off with Trevor anyway, seeming to have developed feelings for him, at least in a way. Winter finds them making love in a hotel room, and holds Trevor at gunpoint, determined to cash in the bounty on his head. However, Trevor manages to turn the tables on all of them, chain Winter and Claire to the bed, and take more of her money before running off to Moscow. The pair follow him there as well, and even call up Eugene to bring Claire more money, which he ends up doing (old loves die hard and all that). They end up consulting another missing-persons agent, who, with more up to date software than Winter, is able to determine that “Trevor McPhee” isn’t actually “Trevor McPhee” at all, and is actually a man named Sam Farber, who’s wanted for an entirely different reason: stealing a special camera, that he himself was making, from a government lab. Claire ends up leaving Eugene and Winter behind, and travels to Beijing following Sam. However, she manages to just barely miss him and ends up traveling through China all alone for months. When she finally gets in contact with Eugene again, the two agree to meet in Tokyo, unaware that Winter is still tailing them (after seemingly giving up on the job beforehand). Claire and Eugene get shot at by various bounty hunters while looking for Sam, but Claire breaks away and ends up finding an almost blind Sam nearby. She takes Sam to an inn in the mountains, where the innkeeper manages to cure Sam’s eyes with a traditional herbal remedy. Sam explains that the camera is a device that was being developed by his father, with the purpose of recording beyond just images and video. The camera actually records the viewers brainwaves as well, in such a way that they can be transferred into a blind person, allowing them to see what the viewer saw. Sam had taken the camera and traveled around the world, recording various people and places, so that his blind mother would be able to see the world for the first time in years. He was also concerned about it getting into the hands of the U.S. government, as he feared they would abuse it. Upon learning all of this, Claire offers to go with Sam on his journey, traveling first to San Francisco to record Sam’s sister, and then to Australia to meet up with Sam’s parents. While everything that’s been happening is going on, news reports throughout the film cover a terrorist attack on a nuclear satellite hovering over the Earth, which eventually results in the satellite coming down, an no one sure of where it’s going to land or what kind of damage it will incur upon the world. Keep in mind: this is only the first half of the movie. There’s still a whole two hours and thirty minutes left. I’ll leave the summary here, as I don’t want this to go on for too long, but I will need to discuss some of what happens in the second half, so be prepared for that.

So, as you can probably tell, there’s a lot going on in this film. Heck, I only covered the first half and it’s still the longest recap I think I’ve done on this blog. This film goes through many different twists, turns, and changes throughout its runtime, even completely changing genres in the latter half, but it’s all presented with a sort of slow, dream-like, art/indie vibe. The choice of soundtrack certainly reflects this, with artists such as Talking Heads, Lou Reed, R.E.M., Nick Cave, U2, and Peter Gabriel, among others. This seems to illustrate the time in which the film was made, coming off the 80’s and moving into the 90’s, wherein this sort of music was very relevant, at least to the alternative crowd. The look of the film also feeds into this, what with its bold yet dark-lit color scheme (especially in the Tokyo sequence, with its blue and pink Blade Runner neon), semi-cyberpunk tech, and some urban areas that look like something out of Total Recall (to a degree, at least). It’s interesting, also, that some of the artists on the soundtrack, especially the likes of Peter Gabriel and Talking Heads, were known for their incorporation of “world music” elements, and in the film’s second half, we head to Australia and meet Sam’s parents who live in a settlement with many aboriginal folks. In addition to this, some of the friends we’ve made along the way, like Eugene, Winter, Chico and such, form a band together with some of the people there, creating a new form of music influenced by traditional and new styles of music. There definitely seems to be a want in the film to create a sense of worldwide connection, or more broadly, “human experience.” The film, while having a general goal, seems to meander from scenario to scenario, and from story-type to story-type, starting from a place of Easy-Rider-esque personal journey for Claire, which jumps into her getting herself involved with a man on the lamb, which leads into her traveling around the whole globe to find this guy and getting others involved along the way, which leads into her learning the truth and wanting to help the guy, which leads into them traveling across Australia during the apocalypse (after the satellite gets taken down and explodes somewhere on Earth), which leads into the relationships between the man and his parents and the relationships that get cultivated within their circle, which eventually ends up with the man and his father pushing beyond what he should have (fueled by a tragedy that occurs at one point), losing most every connection they’ve made, and dragging down some of the ones they had left. In a way, it almost feels like the film is trying to emulate the changes of life, and the various paths and situations we find ourselves in depending on what roads we choose to pursue. It also shows how people can change, or not change, depending on these same choices, or even just what happens around them. Does Claire’s want to help Sam show a change in her self-destructive tendencies or is it just another method for her to reach the same state she already tried to put herself in? Sam and his father’s relationship seems to improve from the volatile state that it’s introduced with, but ironically, their close partnership ends up almost wrecking everything they’d built. So, was this change for the better or for the worse? Even if we can find ourselves a purpose in life or mend some relationships that hurt ourselves and the other person, does that purpose or those relations still hold meaning when they lead to something negative in the end? Were these purposes and relations just another step on the journey of life, and would end up leading to something else after we come out of them? These are the sorts of thoughts I gleaned out of the film, personally. The question that needs to be asked though is: does the film’s long runtime and method of presenting its story justify itself, in terms of what we ultimately get out of it in the end? When you really break down what occurs in the film, it comes across as several standard stories mixed together. You have the noir-esque crime and espionage worldwide chase, the sci-fi story of a device that can be used for good and ill as well as how far or not we should take science as a species, the personal journey of a flighty impulsive person falling into a hole and finding a way out only to fall back in again and so on, the other story of the person who cares for the impulsive one and wants to form a relationship again but knows that they can’t and just chooses to be support instead, and so on and so on. In a traditional writing sense, this makes the whole film feel like it doesn’t know what it wants to be, and instead it tries to be everything. In addition to this, because the stories aren’t really all that new and don’t seem to impart much more than what we’ve already heard, it can seem rather pointless to go through around four hours of slow cinema just to come away with those results. Basically, it has the danger of coming across as a pretentious style-over-substance sort of thing, which I can definitely understand. I’ll admit that, while the film did leave me with what I said before, it also left me wondering if it needed to be told in the way that it was in order to impart these messages. I even found myself going “oh, I guess we’re doing this now” sometimes during the story changes. At the very least, though, I think I am able to look at this film in a different light when thinking of it as an experience or emulation of life through cinema. It’s hard to say if I love this film exactly, but I do think I understand a way that it can be viewed that makes it a little more interesting than it might bee otherwise. At the same time, I can’t blame those that just see it as a bloated slog, or even as a case of artistic vision gone indulgent (which is not uncommon in the arts sometimes, and can happen when artists are given no limits, as was the case here, it seems). It’s already going to be difficult for many to devote time to a four-hour movie, and while longer movies are more common nowadays, I think the slow nature of this film is going to be tough, especially if the person doesn’t get much out of it in the end. It’s a crap-shoot in the end, so I’m not quite sure how to recommend it. However, I do think there are interesting or neat things about it, even if I’m uncertain of how I feel about the whole work. I found the want to show how we can form links between cultures, as well as how we can break them by overstepping, to be a good reminder of how we interact in this more connected world. It’s also cool to see how the late 80’s/early 90’s thought the future was going to be, with music data cards instead of CDs, funky little cameras/view-finders, video calls, etc. Who knows, maybe somewhere down the line, we will invent a camera that gives blind people sight. I guess we just have to hope that they don’t take it as far as they do in this film (though, knowing us, we probably would). I think, ultimately, what a person will connect with or enjoy about a film like this is really going to be down to them individually. I suppose you could say that about most films, but I really do think this is a love it or hate it scenario. You’ll either see it as a fascinating and life-affirming experience, or you’ll see it as an overblown, overlong mess. In the end, it’s up to you. As for me, I’d better wrap this up before I end up making a four-hour review (in page form, anyway), so it’s on to my conclusion.

Personally, I did find this film interesting in its own way, but I’m not sure I’m jumping at the bit to see it again soon. I’m not sure how good of a recommendation that is, but that’s honestly how I feel looking back on it. I will at least say this: I don’t think I would recommend it as your first Wim Wenders film. Wings of Desire is a much better choice on that front, and while I haven’t seen Paris, Texas yet, I’ll go out on a limb and say that it probably would be too. However, if you’re in the right mindset and have the time, then I say it’d be a fine time to travel Until the End of the World. There’s only so much we can do in this life, but sometimes the risks are worth the potential rewards, even in the face of total failure.