The dazzling, wired, hyperconnected techno-frenzied world of wonders we live in today was pretty much predicted back in 1991, when a forgotten, baggy, genre-busting monster of a movie whispered an eerie prophecy that few heard and fewer fully understood.
Wim Wenders, the German writer-director whose ’80s films “Wings of Desire” and “Paris, Texas” collected major awards and who received Oscar nominations for his documentaries “Buena Vista Social Club” and “Pina,” failed to connect with critics or audiences with his adventure-noir-sci-fi-road movie “Until the End of the World.”
The sprawling, 158-minute opus grossed less than $1 million in theaters, hardly ever pops up on television and isn’t available on Netflix or DVD, at least in the US. (You can, however, rent or buy it on Amazon’s streaming video service. There’s also an even more ambitious 270-minute version available on the European DVD, which you’ll need an all-region DVD player to enjoy.)
The movie foretold the centrality to our lives of Skype, the iPad, cellphones, high-def flat-screen television, on-board GPS, E-ZPass, search engines and even the way potentially sinister software lulls the user with an interface of cute cartoon characters.
However none of that is why the film seems so haunting, prescient and profound. “UTEOTW” is a chilling futurist parable with few parallels in the history of cinema.
It’s a pre-apocalyptic vision set eight years in the future, in 1999, when an Indian nuclear satellite has gone rogue and threatens to crash randomly on Earth. Guesses about where it might land cause chaos in various cities as the US considers whether to shoot it down, against UN opposition and disastrous possible consequences.
Our protagonist, Claire Tourneur (played by the late French actress Solveig Dommartin, who devised the story along with her boyfriend Wenders, who in turn wrote the screenplay with the novelist Peter Carey) is a resourceful, restless party girl who agrees to deliver to Paris a bag of money given to her by two bank robbers in Nice.
One way to think about the film is as a role-reversed noir in which the duplicitous, sexy femme fatale is played by William Hurt. Calling himself “Trevor McPhee,” he pops into her life as a hitchhiker, steals some of her money and starts leading her and a detective she hires on a merry chase around the globe. At one point the two leads manage to undress each other and have sex while handcuffed together, but I’ll leave marriage theorists to ponder the metaphorical meaning of that.
Following Trevor, whose real name is Sam Farber, isn’t hard because Wenders has envisioned a world of almost infinite data collection and easy access to it. An especially disquieting moment comes when we encounter the master search engine, whose symbol is a Stalin image and a menacing Russian bear who pounds through databases. Five years before Google was even invented, Wenders saw the dark side of having too much information too readily available. (And with a reference to Palo Alto, Wenders anticipated where much of this tech would originate.)
There’s a half-million-dollar bounty on Trevor/Sam, who is wanted by the US government, the Japanese mob and the KGB because he’s carrying a world-changing Google Glass-like invention created by his father (Max von Sydow) that can’t be entrusted to any government: It’s a set of eyewear that records images that can be uploaded to the cortex of a blind person — such as Trevor’s mom (Jeanne Moreau), who has never seen her own children. Trevor has been going around the world collecting images of his mother’s friendsand loved ones that can be saved on the goggles’ memory system only via intense and exhausting concentration on the part of the wearer.
The two uses are like the difference between romance and pornography, but the imperious von Sydow character insists he has learned how to unleash “the God within us.”
“UTEOTW” has always held a unique place in my heart: It’s the first film I ever saw in New York, where I little thought I’d someday be a film critic. Despite its obscurity (and the fact that until this week I hadn’t seen it in 22 years), I think about it nearly every day as I watch blissed-out iZombies stumble down the street staring lovingly at the faraway signals popping out of their smartphones while utterly blind and oblivious to their actual surroundings.
The serendipitous meeting of strangers that seemed so integral to New York life the night I saw the movie at the Angelika now seems a distant memory: Each of us exists in a roving impenetrable virtual-reality bubble that prevents unknown people from becoming known people.
Every day on the street is just a delayed replay of the climactic moments of “UTEOTW,” when, in an Australian outback that serves as a kind of birthplace for a newly grateful civilization, the survivors of a disaster emerge from their cave into a sunlit and hopeful future — and all everyone is interested in is their iPad-like tablets, which they have discovered can be used to replay their own dreams.
After circling the globe, being shot at and walking away from a plane that lost power in midflight, Claire suffers a nervous breakdown because she runs out of battery power on her monitor.
In Wenders’ future, the apocalypse everyone fears gets cancelled as civilization gets attacked from inside. The terrible final liberation of humankind is escape from the necessity to pay attention to anything but what’s playing in their own minds.