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Information

A.k.a.
Until the End of the World
Year
1991
Runtime
158 min.
Director
Wim Wenders
Genres
Action, Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller
Rating *
6.8
Votes *
7,090
Checks
576
Favs
45
Dislikes
13
Favs/checks
7.8% (1:13)
Favs/dislikes
3:1
* View IMDb information

Top comments

  1. Siskoid's avatar

    Siskoid

    Wim Wenders and Solveig Dommartin (Wings of Desire) reunite for Until the End of the World, and at nearly 5 hours, it's hard to decide where to begin. Set at the turn of the Millennium in a lo-fi near future (that now seems like a side future, almost recognizable), the first part of the epic takes us on the heroine's quest across four continents to find the man she loves/who stole her money (William Hurt), himself on a quest to capture images meant to be transmitted to his blind mother (it'll take three hours, but Jeanne Moreau, coupled with Max von Sydow are worth the wait). Though Wenders plants "future tech" in his world, he mostly lets the locations do the work, finding places that evoke futurism or the postapocalypse, according to where we are in the story. It's often been said that the future is another country, but sometimes, another country is the future (or the past, which could be a future). The film is also very personal because it asks a film maker's question: How do you represent the world? What is the artist's or scientist's responsibility in the preservation of reality? He, himself is doing it by traveling extensively and capturing sights we're unlikely to have seen before. His characters are obsessed with remembering the world, whether through recordings, science-fiction machines, writing or dreaming. And he shows us three "ends of the world". During cinema's longest road trip, we see moral collapse, a world of indolence, mistrust and casual criminality. Once we get to our destination, there is societal collapse, and what a small group of humans might do with a second chance (second chances is a leitmotif). And finally, a collapse of the self into narcissism (and this is easily the oddest part of the film). There's a 3-hour cut of Until the End of the World, but I don't know what they got rid of that I would find superfluous. You can't easily reduce this to plot mechanics because so much of it is about aesthetics. No surprise, it looks gorgeous, and it has a great "adult contemporary" soundtrack too. 2 years 9 months ago
  2. Armoreska's avatar

    Armoreska

    Runtime is actually almost 5 hours. And language mostly english. There's an HDTV from ZDF. 5 years 11 months ago
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In 1 official list

  1. This movie ranks #1232 in The Criterion Collection
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    The Criterion Collection

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