Until the End of the World

Plot

In late 1999, an orbiting Indian nuclear satellite is out of control and predicted to re-enter the atmosphere, threatening unknown populated areas of the Earth. Mass populations trying to flee the likely impact sites cause a worldwide panic. Caught in a traffic jam and suffering from boredom, Claire Tourneur escapes the highway congestion by taking a side road. When she gets into a car crash with a pair of bank robbers, they enlist her to carry their stolen cash to Paris. Along the way, she meets a man being pursued by an armed party who introduces himself as Trevor McPhee, and allows him to travel to Paris with her. After reaching the house of her estranged lover, Eugene, Claire discovers that Trevor has stolen some of the money.

Claire then travels to Berlin and hires missing persons detective Phillip Winter to help her find Trevor through tracking his passport and credit card — he agrees to help when he finds out Trevor has a substantial bounty on his head. However, when Claire meets Trevor for lunch, she betrays Winter and attempts to escape with Trevor. Winter catches the two having sex in a motel room, after which Trevor handcuffs them to the bed and escapes with more of Claire's money. Winter, Claire and Eugene meet in Moscow to continue the search, and find out from Moscow bounty hunters that Trevor is actually Sam Farber, wanted for stealing the prototype of a secret research project. Multiple government agencies and freelance bounty hunters are chasing him to recover the device. Winter quits the job, intimidated by the even larger bounty on Sam's head, but Eugene buys a tracking computer to help Claire. However, when the computer finds Sam's location, she leaves Eugene while she thinks he is sleeping.

Following Sam on the Trans-Siberian Railway, she travels through China and reaches Japan, where she rescues Winter from a botched capture attempt at a capsule hotel. She finds Sam at a pachinko parlor rapidly losing his eyesight, and buys them train tickets to a random mountain inn. There, Sam reveals that the stolen prototype belongs to his father, Henry Farber and is a device for recording and translating brain impulses. He has been recording places and people around the world for his blind mother, Edith, but the recordings are exhausting his eyes. After the innkeeper heals Sam's eyes, he and Claire fly to San Francisco to take more recordings before heading to the Australian outback, where his father's laboratory is located.

Eugene, who had traveled to Japan only to be abandoned by Claire once again, teams up with Winter to capture Sam. Along with the bank robbers, they travel to Central Australia, but Eugene fights Sam upon finding him, causing both to get arrested. When Winter bails them out, they discover that the bag containing the camera was taken from Claire while she was drugged with sleeping pills. However, the bag also contains the original tracker attached to Claire's bank money, which the bank robbers can trace. Claire and Sam take off in a small airplane to retrieve the camera.

When the Indian nuclear satellite is shot down by the US government, the resulting Nuclear electromagnetic pulse (NEMP) effect wipes out all unshielded electronics worldwide. Claire and Sam are forced to land the plane when the engine quits. They walk across the desert until they find the camera with the bounty hunter Burt. Reuniting with Eugene, Winter and the bank robbers, they travel in hand-cranked diesel-powered jeeps to the lab, which is sheltered in a massive cave.

Henry tries to synchronize the camera with Sam's memory in order to transmit clean images to Edith's brain, but Sam is injured and too tired to perform well. After father and son come to blows, Claire tries the experiment with her recordings to phenomenal success. It is revealed that Henry wishes to apply the technology to dream retrieval in order to win a Nobel Prize. However, Henry pushes too hard and Edith eventually dies of exhaustion. Eugene's writer's block seems to have been cured and he begins composing on an antique typewriter.

After Edith's death, Henry begins working on how to record human dreams. The Aborigines disagree with his goals and abandon him, so he experiments on himself, Claire, and Sam. They eventually become addicted to viewing their dreams on portable video screens. Eugene finds Claire curled up in a rock crevasse glued to her screen and takes her back to the village, driving her into painful withdrawal when he refuses to replace the batteries for her screen. He finishes the novel about her adventure and gives it to her, curing her of "the disease of images." Meanwhile, Sam wanders into the rocky desert labyrinths with his own screen and is ultimately rescued by the Aborigines. Henry is taken by the CIA while lying in the laboratory's dream-recording chair. Eugene and Claire leave the village together but break up for good. Later, Claire becomes an astronaut and spends her 30th birthday as an ecological observer, orbiting in a space station. Eugene, Winter and the bank robbers celebrate with her by singing "Happy Birthday" over a video fax.

Cast

Production

The Australian Film Finance Corporation invested $3.7 million in the film.

Reception

Until the End of the World was poorly received in its first release, and was both a critical and commercial failure. In the United States, the film was released by Warner Bros. in December 1991, and was on a small number of screens with almost no advertising. The U.S. box office grossed $752,856.

In January 1992, Roger Ebert gave the film 2 stars out of 4, describing the film as lacking a "narrative urgency" required to sustain interest in the story and that it furthermore "plays like a film that was photographed before it was written, and edited before it was completed". A documentary about the globe-trekking production would have likely been more interesting than the film itself, he said.

Director's cut

The Wim Wenders Foundation confirmed on Facebook that The Criterion Collection would be releasing the director's cut.

A 295-minute director's cut, modified slightly from the 1996 version, began touring US art house theaters in Fall 2015 along with remasters of most of Wenders feature-length films. This version has an intermission at 2 hours, 15 minutes. This version debuted on home media in the U.S. on Turner Classic Movies on July 24, 2017.

Soundtrack

Music From the Motion Picture Soundtrack Until The End of the World was released January 1991, and includes the following tracks:

1. "Opening Title" – Graeme Revell
2. "Sax And Violins" – Talking Heads
3. "Summer Kisses, Winter Tears" – Julee Cruise
4. "Move with Me (Dub)" – Neneh Cherry
5. "The Adversary" – Crime & the City Solution
6. "What's Good" – Lou Reed
7. "Last Night Sleep" – Can
8. "Fretless" – R.E.M.
9. "Days" – Elvis Costello
10. "Claire's Theme" – Graeme Revell
11. "(I'll Love You) Till The End Of The World" – Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
12. "It Takes Time" – Patti Smith (With Fred Smith)
13. "Death's Door" – Depeche Mode
14. "Love Theme" – Graeme Revell
15. "Calling All Angels" (Remix Version) – Jane Siberry with k.d. lang
16. "Humans from Earth" – T-Bone Burnett
17. "Sleeping in the Devil's Bed" – Daniel Lanois
18. "Until the End of the World" – U2
19. "Finale" – Graeme Revell

Two additional songs were used in the film, but were not included on the soundtrack:

The German film director Uli M Schueppel made a documentary film about the recording of "(I'll Love You) Till The End Of The World" by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. The film was released 1990 as The Song and re-released 2004 under a new arrangement.