Until the End of the World (1991, Wim Wenders) (Patreon)

48/100

A reasonably compelling two-hour sci-fi movie preceded by a fatally self-indulgent three-hour travelogue. Never saw the U.S. theatrical cut, but if it focuses on the former while tossing most of the latter, odds are I'd prefer it (#philistine); among other virtues, that would significantly reduce the prominence of Solveig Dommartin, who's just as awkwardly wooden here as she was in Wings of Desire. (I feel guilty for saying so, since she died so young. Still, yeesh.) Even with a stronger female lead, however, the film would still suffer from its fundamental narrative pointlessness, from which individual scenes fail to rescue it by virtue of any self-contained glory. (In other words, it's tiresome on both the macro and micro level.) Ostensible panic about a failing nuclear satellite quickly becomes all but irrelevant, as we instead just follow Claire inexplicably following Trevor/Sam (initially to recover the comparatively small amount of money that he stole, her possession of which makes zero sense to begin with) to various countries that Wenders and Dommartin felt like visiting. Unlike some subsequent Wenders films, this one is rarely actively painful to endure—only the "wacky" gunfight and chase in the Tokyo capsule hotel made me cringe as hard as I did throughout The End of Violence and The Million Dollar Hotel. But it's almost never very interesting, either, leaning hard on its soundtrack—I frankly resent being repeatedly reminded that Bono wrote "In my dream, I was drowning my sorrows / But my sorrows had learned to swim"—and generally coming across like something quasi-improvised over the course of a lengthy globe-hopping vacation. And actually no, rewind, I also cringed pretty much every time Sam Neill turns up to embody self-pitying ineffectuality combined with fatally low self-esteem. (I despise the term "beta male," but it's hard to argue that it doesn't fit Eugene.)

Just when I'd lost all hope, however, resigning myself to two more hours of light boredom (occasionally leavened by an appearance from Bounty Bear, this imagined future's uncharacteristically hilarious tracking app), Until the End of the World settles down in Australia and metamorphoses into both (a) a genuine science-fiction tale and (b) an ensemble hangout musical. Papa Farber's experimental gizmo gets a whole lot of needless setup during the travelogue portion—I didn't e.g. need to see Sam lose his eyesight and get nursed back to health over the course of like half an hour of screen time—but the actual process of implanting images via a combination of visual data and reconstructed neural pathways is fascinating, and provides Wenders with the opportunity to play around with digital abstraction in ways that still look pretty cool almost three decades later. (Plus the outback Batcave calls to mind Ken Adam’s work on early Bond.) Old pros Max von Sydow (who died three days after I watched this) and Jeanne Moreau take over the spotlight, and the movie's various supporting dudes (including Rüdiger Vogler as yet another incarnation of Phillip Winter), who'd previously been little more than a source of irritation, suddenly start participating in joyous impromptu jam sessions. (Again, this was all carefully set up—Chico reveals that he's an aspiring drummer right at the beginning of the movie—but the gratification gets delayed wayyyy too long.) Climactic dream obsession doesn't entirely work, in part because it requires Dommartin to convincingly lose her mind, but Claire and Sam's desire to do nothing but watch their own mind imagery 24-7 anticipates Infinite Jest's samizdat (aka The Entertainment), which is of more interest to me than are the film's much-touted (these days) prototypes for tablet computers and Skype calls. (Though it was an odd experience to see Wenders' vision of a near-future that's now 20 years in the past. Most of the near-futures in movies from my adolescence and early adulthood are just happening now, à la Blade Runner and The Running Man.) Anyway, ends quite strongly, but that's equivalent to a two-hour film that only gets good in its last 40 minutes. There was no reason for this to be one of the dozen or so longest movies I've ever seen.