"Until the End of the World" is a movie that has never gotten the recognition that it deserves. Occurring in 1999, when the Indian nuclear satellite has gone out of control (and no one knows where it's going to land),the movie focuses on Frenchwoman Claire Tourneur (Solveig Dommartin) following American Sam Farber (William Hurt) all over the world. Sam has a most ingenious device that enables his blind mother (Jeanne Moreau) to see, and some other people are trying to get their hands on it.

I simply can't do justice to the movie by trying to describe it. You have to see it to believe it. For the soundtrack, director Wim Wenders went to several singers and had them write the songs that they were going to write at the end of the millennium. The result was beyond incredible. Few movies have ever reached this movie's greatness.

I wonder what ever became of Solveig Dommartin.

I envy the folks who managed to watch the shorter three hour version of this movie. I happened to come across a download version of the film in three parts, each with it's own set of opening credits that amounted to nearly five hours of the director's cut. Quite honestly, the most interesting thing that happened in the movie for me was that horrific car crash to open the picture when one of the bank robbers threw that beer bottle out the window of his car. After that, it was a looong, slow descent down an extended slope, notwithstanding the global odyssey that took place involving the principal characters. That whole business about the runaway nuclear satellite from India barely managed to impact my attention span. More than anything, when it came to the sci-fi aspects of this picture, I was reminded of the original mid-Sixties 'Star Trek' series in which Gene Roddenberry's futuristic vision came up with things like flip phones and Uhura's mini-skirts, things that translated into reality only a short time later. For this picture released in 1991, director Wim Wenders made a dramatic leap of faith to envision a world eight years into the future that included such things as viewing kiosks, facial recognition and locator technology, and glass front refrigerators, which when I think of the latter, who really wants to see wilting celery stalks and dripping milk cartons even before opening the door? I have to admit, some of the hand held telephone devices looked kind of interesting, except for the fact that they all looked a lot like art-deco artifacts from the Fifties. I don't know, maybe I'm missing something here compared to all the folks who praise the film for it's poetic vision, but for all of the lovely cinematography and stellar cast, for me this was as dry as the Australian Outback, which you could probably cross a lot sooner than the amount of time it takes to watch this picture.

Set in 1999, a woman (Solveig Dommartin) has a car accident with some bank robbers, who enlist her help to take the bank money to a drop in Paris. On the way she runs into another fugitive from the law (William Hurt),an American who is being chased by the CIA.

Wenders realized the film would be too long for the commercial distribution, so he kept control of the unedited film rather than surrendering it to distributors. After the film's theatrical release, Wenders worked with multiple copies and, with Sam Neill, recording additional narration, completed a 280-minute version. The longer cut, which Wenders regards as the definitive version of the film, unfolds as a trilogy and is presented in three parts (the titles appear three different times).

The version I saw was around 150 minutes. If it were any longer, it would definitely need to be broken up into parts. It is a bit confusing, and definitely strange. This is science fiction, but not your typical kind. Really more off the wall, artistically sci-fi, like "Alphaville".