Until The End Of the World

Stars: William Hurt (The Doctor, Kiss of the Spider Woman), Solveig Dommartin (Wings of Desire), Jeanne Moreau (Jules and Jim, La Femme Nikita), Sam Neill (The Hunt for Red October, Memoirs of an Invisible Man), Max Von Sydow (The Seventh Seal, Hannah and Her Sisters, Pelle the Conqueror). Director Wim Wenders (Paris, Texas, Wings of Desire) and star Dommartin cooked up this half-baked futuristic road movie which basically allowed Wenders to take in 15 cities on four continents (all of it tax-deductible). William Hurt stars as Trevor McPhee, the ultimate traveler who races from city to city and always looks as if he's suffering from headaches and eyestrain. Dommartin plays Claire Tourneur who is robbed by Trevor, and follows him from city to city--for budding love rather than the lost money. Sam Neill is Eugene, Claire's novelist lover, who follows Claire as she is following Trevor. For the first 90 minutes of this 2-hour plus movie we don't know diddly--except that a nuclear-powered satellite may be crashing somewhere on Earth any minute. Eventually, we learn that Trevor is toting around a new camera that is able to take pictures which the blind can see. The last hour offers some interesting commentary and HDTV visuals as Trevor, Claire, and Eugene all converge on Trevor's father's laboratory in Australia. But by then most people will have tired of the going-nowhere-fast storyline, not to mention Claire's numerous conversations conducted in untranslated French (if nothing else, this film is always cosmopolitan--and single language viewers be damned). Wonderful cinematography and an exceptional soundtrack (with original cuts by U2, R.E.M., David Byrne, k.d. lang, Peter Gabriel, and others) can't quite compensate for utter lack of dramatic tension. Audience: Techno-junkies. [Blu-ray/DVD Review—Dec. 3, 2019—Criterion, 287 min., in English, French & German w/English subtitles, R, DVD: 3 discs, $29.95; Blu-ray: 2 discs, $39.95—Making its first appearance on DVD and Blu-ray, 1991’s Until the End of the World features a great transfer with a DTS-HD 5.1 soundtrack on the Blu-ray release. Extras include an introduction by director Wim Wenders (14 min.), the 1990 behind-the-scenes documentary 'Wim Wenders in Tokyo' (62 min.), a 2001 interview with Wenders (31 min.), deleted scenes (31 min.), the 1991 short 'The Song' by filmmaker Uli M. Schueppel detailing the recording of the soundtrack song '(I’ll Love You) Till the End of the World' by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (18 min.), a soundtrack segment with Wenders (16 min.), a featurette with Wenders and musician David Byrne (8 min.), the 1993 Wenders interview 'Up-Down Under Roma' (7 min.), and a booklet featuring essays by critics Bilge Ebiri and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky. Bottom line: nearly twice as long as the original VHS release, this Criterion edition allows viewers to see the full-length film in the director’s cut.]