UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD
A film review by Prentiss Riddle
Copyright 1992 Prentiss Riddle
I just saw UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD and have mixed emotions.
It is directed by Wim Wenders, stars William Hurt and Solveig Dommartin (who you'll remember if you saw Wenders' gorgeous WINGS OF DESIRE), and is written by Australian novelist Peter Carey (author of the wonderful book and movie BLISS).
Without getting into spoilers, I'll just say that the movie is set in 1999, when a nuclear satellite accident is threatening to start off an automated WWIII in the upper atmosphere. Against this background boy meets girl and boy, girl, and assorted bad guys chase each other across four continents of high tech and urban decay.
I'd describe the movie as equally influenced by film noir, cyberpunk and magical realism. The mix doesn't always sit well. It is as slow as the rest of Wim Wenders' languorous work, something I usually enjoy, but the conventions of noir and especially cyberpunk would call for speed. Its plot meanders like a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, playing with our expectations about beginning, middle and end, an effect which worked beautifully in BLISS but doesn't seem to work here. Wenders pays more attention to the science fiction aspect of his cyberpunk theme than most so-called cyberpunk movies -- in fact computer animation and HDTV effects play as important a part in the movie as the stunning landscapes -- but at crucial points the technology leaves reality behind and becomes magic or metaphor.
Still, this movie is trying to do a lot of important and exciting things. The sense of "end times" which naturally occurs at the end of a millennium still has many of us by the throat. Yet we escaped the Cold War by the skin of our teeth, and we no longer have a clear focus for our sense of doom. Maybe it's already time for movies which ask how we're going to feel when we wake up on a bright morning in the next millennium to find a day which is much like the one which went before it -- dangerous, yes, but not necessarily the End of the World.
-- Prentiss Riddle ("aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada") riddle@rice.edu
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