It was 1869 when The Rhinegold, the first drama of Richard Wagner’s four-part opera The Ring of the Nibelung, was first performed. This was almost 20 years after the publishing of Wagner’s various essays detailing the idea of the gesamtkunstwerk, the “total artwork,” a work of theater that encompasses all or as many forms of art imaginable and synthesizes them into one, an idea he realized in The Ring. Wagner died in 1883, but I can’t help but wonder what he would think about Wim Wenders’ 1991 science-fiction road movie epic Until the End of the World. The concept that he popularized can technically be applied to any film — after all, film is the union of sight, sound, and everything in between, which is already pretty close to matching the definition of the word — but if there’s any film that could exemplify his theory, it would have to be one that’s as monumental and boundless as one filmed in 11 countries on 4 continents on a budget of $23 million with a staggering 287-minute runtime. Wenders has said that he aimed for this to be “the ultimate road movie,” but I’d go as far as to say that he created the ultimate movie, period.
Sadly, Until the End of the World wasn’t met with the enthusiasm I have for it upon its release. It’s rumored that in its fully uncut state, the film’s runtime stretched to a gargantuan 20+ hours, a number obviously unsuitable for a theatrical screening. Wenders was required by the studio to make an average length movie, and because of that, the version of Until the End of the World that hit American theaters in 1991 was 158 minutes, a marred “Reader’s Digest” version of the film, as he put it. It received mixed reviews and failed to return more than 5% of its budget — a failure in every sense of the word. Although there would be multiple versions of the film — a 179-minute cut in Europe, a 239-minute cut in Japan, and a 280-minute cut that split the film into a trilogy — it wasn’t until 2014 that the definitive 287-minute director’s cut of the film would be revisited by Wenders and restored in 4K. This was the version that was released on DVD and Blu-ray by the Criterion Collection in 2019; for the first time, the general public could experience Wender’s magnum opus in its true glory.
It’s the near future of 1999. An Indian nuclear satellite has gone out of control and could crash at any time and in any place, and Claire Tourneur (Solveig Dommartin) couldn’t care less. She’s partying around Europe, trying to get over her boyfriend sleeping with her best friend and plagued by a recurring nightmare. While stuck in a traffic jam in the south of France, Claire decides to veer onto a side route and gets into an accident with Chico (Chick Ortega) and Raymond (Eddy Mitchell), two nice men who, it turns out, have just robbed a bank. Now she’s a part of their plan and is en route to Paris to deliver the money when she runs into Trevor McPhee (William Hurt), who hitches a ride with her to escape the man following him with a gun (played by Ernie Dingo). Claire arrives at the house of her past lover Eugene (Sam Neill) and realizes that Trevor has stolen some of the money that she was promised a cut of, so she hires private detective Philip Winter (Rüdiger Vogler) to track him down. From here on out, our characters travel around the world, each on a mission of their own, and if this sounds like a lot, well, that’s because it is — this is all within the first hour of the movie.
There’s a common misconception that films with tremendous runtimes are equally slow in their pace, and while there are definitely slow movies out there — Béla Tarr’s bleak behemoth Sátántangó lasts for over seven and a half hours and has roughly only 150 lingering shots — there are plenty of films that immediately disprove this fallacy, and Until the End of the World is near the forefront of the bunch. Save for Sam Neill’s opening narration that explains the film’s backdrop and the few moments it spends following Claire as she awakens and stumbles out of a dying party, there isn’t a single second of this film that lags. It’s a film that follows its protagonists and views the world through their seemingly aimless daze, quickly absorbing the cityscapes and the views from hotel, car, and train windows before dashing to the next locale, and all of it is captured through frequent Wenders collaborator Robby Müller’s cinematography. To call it beautiful would be an understatement as vast as the world it pictures. There are so many compositions in Until the End of the World where it seems like buildings extend to the heavens and the horizon is merely an objective for the characters to reach. If you were to remove every scene with dialogue in it, you’d have a stunning travelogue on your hands.
Of course, you’d be missing out on some incredible science fiction. The actual reason for why the film follows its seemingly directionless zigzag pattern is eventually revealed in a series of other revelations — Trevor McPhee is actually Sam Farber, a man wanted for international espionage after stealing an invention made by his father from the U.S. government. The device in question records brain impulses, which are then to be transferred to a blind person, allowing them to see, and Sam is traveling to record his family members for his mother. Even if the goggles’ clunky design shows the film’s age, it, along with all of the other envisaged technology present in the film like virtual assistants in cars and video calls, is still plentifully fascinating, especially after the film settles in Australia for its latter half. It’s here that what you could call a real plot develops. After the United States shoots down the nuclear satellite, nearly every piece of technology gets completely wiped, leaving Sam and Claire stranded in the middle of the outback. They eventually find Eugene, Winter, and Chico in the back of a hand-cranked diesel truck, and they make their way to Sam’s parents, Henry (Max von Sydow) and Edith (Jeanne Moreau). Once there, the process of transferring the images begins, and outside of the experimentations inside Henry’s secret lab, all of our other characters are anxiously waiting for any sort of confirmation that the outside world exists and, in an inexplicably hilarious turn of events, form a band. It’s a jarring change of pace on paper, going from a globetrotting adventure with traces of action and romance to a more serious, outright science-fiction drama, but by the time the film makes its final transition from Los Angeles to Australia, it’s lulled you into the rhythm of its persistent pace.
It’s also in its latter half where Until the End of the World’s wildest visuals come into play. The technological aspects of the film do show their age, but it’s how unnervingly accurate it is in many areas that gives it a prescient quality, which makes the film’s final narrative development that much more impactful. After Edith passes away on New Year’s Eve after contact with the outside world is reestablished, Henry sets his sights on a new, radical experiment: recording human dreams, and the images that he eventually succeeds in producing are unlike anything ever put to screen. The vivid, distorted clusters of pixels are hypnotic, but that these digital cacophonies are thirty years old and were constructed by Wenders long before digital film and computer-generated effects would become the mainstream is genuinely astounding. Not only are the visualized dreams captivating, but the effect that they have on Claire, Sam, and Henry is possibly the most haunting omen in the entire film. Watching the three of them spiral into addiction and borderline insanity as they clutch their tiny monitors, desperate to see just one more of their dreams, feels like a nascent warning of the dangers of the internet and social media, and it’s attributes like this that have helped Until the End of the World stand the test of time.
There are two lines that stuck with me on my most recent viewing of Until the End of the World. The first comes in an instance of Eugene’s narration, taken straight from the novel that he writes over the course of the film: “…such were the passions of the Farber family, that the experiments seemed of greater importance than the end of time itself.” The second comes during one of Eugene, Winter, and the other members’ many jam sessions: “The purpose of our journey had been so that this music might bloom here, on the edge of what was possibly the end of the world.” Both of these quotes highlight what’s maybe the most beautiful thing about Until the End of the World to me: how it handles time. There are plenty of side characters that pop in and out of the story — Claire’s best friend Makiko (Adelle Lutz), Mr. and Mrs. Mori (Chishū Ryū and Kuniko Miyake), a drunken man whom Claire bumps into who we later see has kidnapped a politician, etc. — but the adventures of our core characters are seemingly the only thing that matters in the whole world; when their story ends, time itself might as well end with it. For 287 minutes, though, we get to experience one of the most colossal achievements in cinema, one that hopefully will only gain more acclaim with time.
