The final year of the 20th century found humanity both excited and terrified. As the new century rolled in, the relationship between society and technology grew closer, shifting gears to face the future. Acceleration collapsed into the present, and to this day, the world feels like its only going to spin faster and faster. As with everything, life never ended being quite as people imagined it.
Nine years before the 21st century and its own brand of madness, the first ever public internet server went online, and the dream (or nightmare) of worldwide uninterrupted communication was beginning to bloom. A month after this event saw the premiere of Wim Wenders’ 12th feature film, Until the End of the World. It was a futuristic behemoth of a motion picture dealing with technology, the future, and the ever existing human search for purpose.
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The Long Road to the Ultimate Road Movie
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Thought of as the “ultimate road movie,” Until the End of the World is a world-trotting epic that took nearly a year to film and $23 million to make. At one time, the film had a 20-hour cut, which obviously has never seen the light of day. In fact, it took two decades to see a wide public release of a cut that Wenders actually liked. That’s because in 1991, the film’s distributors chose a two and a half hour cut for the theatrical release, which the director insistently pleaded to be longer, resulting in a “reader’s digest” version, as Wenders would refer to it, which ran 158 minutes version.
A commercial and critical flop, the film found more success with its soundtrack (featuring songs from U2, Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel, Nick Cave, and others) and was quickly forgotten. Thankfully, the great Criterion Collection released the Wenders-approved four-and-a-half-hour version, majestically restored and in 4K, just a few months before the COVID-19 pandemic struck the world. It ended up being poetic and ironic, for the biggest road trip in cinematic history to be available to people at a time when they were not able to leave their homes. Bound to their screens, the film’s approach to technology found a suiting timing to arrive.
The 5-Hour Plot of Until the End of the World
Set in the final year of the 20th century, Until the End of the World begins with a hovering shot of planet Earth, a place that finds itself troubled and paranoid by a malfunctioning Indian satellite which will crash against the planet; it’s a nuclear satellite, and its crash would cause a massive nuclear electromagnetic pulse. Everybody fears for their lives, everybody but Claire Tourneur (Solveig Dommartin, who also envisioned the story with Wenders and scouted across the planet for over a year before filming began).
Staying in Venice and processing her breakup with Eugene (Sam Neill, who also narrates the film), Claire is heading back to her native France when a car crash changes her perspective on life. Following this, she decides that this new lease on life she has been granted will lead her to find purpose and live a meaningful life. What follows is her chance re-encounter with Trevor McPhee (William Hurt), a fugitive from the law who carries a gadget (the object of the law’s pursuit) that records visual imagery which can then be translated for the blind to see. He is going around the globe collecting images with such device, while being trailed by law enforcement.
Claire becomes enamored and ultimately obsessed with Trevor, and begins to follow him in a chase across the globe which takes her to Berlin, Lisbon, Moscow, Tokyo, San Francisco. Eventually they, along with a varied set of characters, end up in the Australian Outback, where Trevor, whose real name is Sam Farber, hopes to meet with his father, another fugitive scientist (played by the great Max Von Sydow). Sam’s family has been hiding out with an Indigenous community deep in Australia where they have a high-tech lab, and Sam reunites with them to deliver the images to his blind mother Edith (French New Wave icon Jeanne Moreau), so that she can finally see her family after many years.
This barely describes the first act and beginning of the second. The film is more than gigantic; there are very few words that can describe its magnitude. This piece certainly does not cover everything about the film, which manages, in its nearly five hours, to create many layers of significance. Incorporating film noir and science-fiction with existential drama and experimental filmmaking, in its finally director-approved version, Until the End of the World delivers its promise to truly be the ultimate road movie, here’s why.
A Giant Odyssey with the World as its Highway
In this imagined future, technology has allowed for life to be lived faster. As if it were almost a warning of what living in 2022 is, cars equipped with GPS, highly-advanced tracking technology, and video telephones, which all help the characters in the film able to move with extreme ease. This facilitates the narrative to incorporate the amount of traveling it does, without it feeling overwhelming.
Until the End of the World hints at a globalized society, one where stories can transcend frontiers and contexts, here then the road becomes the world itself. “A chase across the earth while an out-of-control nuclear satellite threatens to crash into the planet,” is the original idea by Wenders conceived in the 1970s, and it perfectly describes in simple words just how enormous the plot is.
The Transcendentalism of the Unknown
“It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey” — sure, that phrase has become a cliché regarding road movies (and life in general). The constant emphasis on both ideas, journey and destination, ignores an important idea that is central to this film. This adventure on which Claire embarks has no fixed destination, but it also has no roadmap; the journey itself is undefined, restless, and guided only by her determination to find something new.
This search for something more out of life is shared by all characters in Until the End of the World, whether it is Sam’s desire for his father to know he loves him and for his mother to see, Chico’s (Claire’s friend whom initially crashed into her) determination to be a famous musician, Henry Farber’s obsession to make his wife see again, or Eugene and private detective Philip Winter’s (Rüdiger Vogler) loyalty to Claire, and desire to be alongside her no matter what.
Despite this, the outcome of it all is an absolute mystery, and nobody ever truly gets what they want. Mystery, arbitrariness, and an almost spiritual interconnectedness guides their adventures more than they themselves do. It’s this more transcendental aspect of it all that Until the End of the World faces, and it’s beautiful. At the end, the journey and the destination surrender to the ultimate strange mystery of life.
Looking for the Future in the Future: The Road as a Place of Change
This genre has used the road trip as an allegory for development and change, a metaphor for life itself. Movement in these films, and especially in Until the End of the World, alludes to not only spatial trajectories but also temporal ones, with characters moving toward the future; it’s even more emphasized here, as the film is set in the near future, heading towards another future.
The roadway in the film is not only traveled through various forms of transportation, and over various continents. It is not physically defined or confined, because the most important road is the inner one, the one which every character must face. The metaphysical understanding of the concept of adventure and journey make this arguably the most profound and philosophical road movie.
The End of the Road
With the massive cinematic scope of it all, its philosophical observations and emphasis on the relationship of humans with technology as part of the future, Until the End of the World promises a lot. The promise of the ultimate road movie is finally delivered through the conceptual approach to the film’s final act. As the satellite is nuked by the United States, the world’s communications fall apart. Despite any differences they might have had, all the characters arrive to the Farber lab in Australia, and bond while they wait for the possibly impending apocalypse. Through this, the experiments trying to get Edith Farber to finally see prove successful. The mission is now complete, the road has reached its end, so what’s left to it? The final hour of the film takes the road movie one step further, and dares to ask if the end of the journey is the beginning of another — what actually lies beyond?
As Edith passes away on the last day of the year, communications with the rest of the world are resumed, the satellite’s destruction didn’t bring upon the nuclear apocalypse on Earth, and the world is not ending after all. Instead, what comes next seems much more like the end of the world, and oddly similar to the actual modern world. After the passing of their matriarch, the Farbers become obsessed with using their technology to explore dreams, becoming addicted to them. Eugene stays writing at the lab and observes them slowly detach from reality, becoming obsessed with resolving their own subconscious, spending days rewatching their dreams on screens over and over again.
As one journey ended, another one began. The future’s future is portrayed in a grim manner, as the end of the world did not come from a nuclear blast, but from humanity’s narcissism. The rapid advance into the future, hand by hand with technology, disposed Claire, Sam, and Henry of their own humanity. They eventually manage to regain touch with reality, but for a minute there, they were at the mercy of screens.
Wenders poses the ultimate question for the ultimate movie, and in one of its most memorable lines, Sam Neill’s character states a possible solution: “I didn’t know the cure for the disease of images. All I knew was how to write. But I believed in the magic and the healing power of words and stories." It’s a rather optimistic view of the future, in a film that is not quite dystopian but certainly not utopian. Despite humanity’s impulse for self-destruction and the complications that new roads might bring upon, the filmmaker proposes an ultimately hopeful view that the fundamental things that make us human will still be there in the future to help us find purpose in life.
