World News

I've always had a fascination with German filmmaker Wim Wenders. Here is a filmmaker that has helmed classics like Wings Of Desire to meandaring snoozefests like The End Of Violence. Until The End Of The World falls somewhere between these two.

Originally a six hour epic, Until The End Of The World was brutally cut down to two hours and forty five minutes for American audiences. It's an incoherent mess, but what a beautiful mess it is. Shot in eight countries, Wenders set out to make the ultimate road trip movie.

Set in the distant future of 1999, a bored young woman, Solveig Dommartin, with a bag of stolen cash, sets out on an adventure. Along the way she picks up a mysterious hitchhiker, William Hurt, who is being pursued for an invention he has created that helps the blind see. The two fall for one another and she joins him on his quest to get his invention into the right hands.

Since it's missing about three hours of footage, the movie is sometimes hard to follow. That being said, I still really enjoyed it. The two leads work well together, and the supporting cast, which includes Sam Neill and Max Von Sydow, is quite good. The soundtrack is one of my favorite soundtracks ever. Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, R.E.M., Lou Reed, U2, Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds, and Depeche Mode are just some of the artists who contributed to it. And it's just a beautiful film to look at. Even when the story gets muddled, it's still visually stunning.

The movie was cowritten by Wenders and Dommartin, who were a couple at the time. In the original version, the film was broke down into three parts, but the American version feels like it only has two. The first half of the movie is more solid than the second half, which is probably due to all the cuts made.

The film took almost a decade to shoot. Wenders originally wanted to shoot it in 70 mm, but due to budget constraints opted to shoot in the then fairly new format of High Definition. Shooting all over the world also proved costly. China wouldn't even allow him to film there. So he sent Dommartin, armed with a camera, and had her shoot it herself.

The six hour European cut is available in Europe, of course, but has never been released stateside. We can't even get the American version on dvd. Anchor Bay was in talks to release the director's cut, but that fell by the wayside. I would love to see this version someday.