Note: Until the End of the World exists in multiple versions, the most expansive being the nearly five-hour director’s cut released years after the original theatrical run. The longer version allows the film’s wandering structure — its globe-spanning travel, technological speculation, and philosophical detours — to breathe more fully, though it also requires a certain stamina from even devoted viewers.

The soundtrack occupies a special place in the film’s legacy. Director Wim Wenders reportedly asked participating musicians to imagine the kind of music they might be making a decade in the future when composing their contributions. The result is less a literal prediction of future sounds than a fascinating snapshot of major artists working at the outer edge of their early-1990s creativity.

As for the film itself, it remains a curious hybrid: part road movie, part technological fable, part romantic obsession, and part philosophical meditation on images, memory, and dreams. Like many of Wenders’ most ambitious projects, it is best approached less as a tightly engineered narrative and more as a long cinematic journey — one whose most memorable moments often arrive when the plot pauses and the mood takes over.

Epigraph

In the blood of Eden lie the woman and the man
With the man in the woman and the woman in the man
In the blood of Eden lie the woman and the man
We wanted the union, oh the union of the woman and the man
— Peter Gabriel, “Blood of Eden”

I love Wim Wenders. My favorite of his films is Until the End of the World, followed closely by Paris, Texas. Wings of Desire is good too, though perhaps a little chalk. The American Friend — with Dennis Hopper wandering through a Patricia Highsmith plot — is offbeat and charming in that peculiar late-70s European way.

The End of Violence is terrible.

But Until the End of the World is something else entirely: a sprawling, beautiful, occasionally baffling film that might best be described as a magnificent mess. The director’s cut runs close to five hours, and even devoted fans tend to fade somewhere around hour three. That’s not really a criticism. The movie feels less like a conventional narrative and more like a long road — something you travel through rather than simply watch.

The story centers on Claire Tourneur, played by Solveig Dommartin, a restless Parisian drifting through life when she encounters a mysterious traveler named Sam Farber, played by William Hurt. Sam is carrying stolen technology — a device capable of recording images directly from the human brain — and he is trying to reach his father, a scientist working in the Australian desert. The purpose of the machine is unexpectedly tender: Sam’s father believes it may allow his blind wife to see again by transmitting visual images through Sam’s eyes.

But because the technology has been stolen from a corporate research project, Sam is being chased by various interested parties who would very much like the machine returned. This sets the film in motion. Claire becomes fascinated with Sam and begins following him across continents as he attempts to evade his pursuers.

What follows is one of the great wandering journeys in cinema.

The story moves through Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Moscow, Beijing, Tokyo, and eventually Australia. There are gangsters, satellite technology, eccentric scientists, and the faint sense that the entire world has become one enormous road. The film is technically a thriller, but it rarely behaves like one. Wenders is much more interested in movement, landscapes, and the strange emotional gravity that develops between two people traveling together.

The relationship between Sam and Claire is itself slightly unstable. Part romance, part obsession, part philosophical partnership. At times it almost feels like a kind of mutual kidnapping. Sam keeps disappearing, Claire keeps chasing him, and neither seems entirely capable of escaping the other’s orbit.

It probably didn’t help that the two actors reportedly did not get along during the making of the film. Hurt, already an established star after performances in films like Body Heat, brought a certain American cool to the role. He had that slightly detached, inward quality that made him so effective in the early 1980s. Dommartin, on the other hand, plays Claire with an intensity that borders on obsession. The tension between them gives the film a strange electricity. At times it feels less like romantic chemistry than two people circling each other warily.

Eventually their journey brings them to Australia, where Sam’s father is conducting his experiments in the outback.

And then comes one of the great scenes in modern cinema.

Claire and Sam are flying over the Australian desert when the plane suddenly loses power. The engines fall silent. Instead of plunging toward the earth, the aircraft begins to glide, drifting quietly over the vast red landscape below.

There is no panic.

Just sky.
Motion.
Silence.

And then the music enters.

Blood of Eden by Peter Gabriel begins to play.

Gabriel’s voice arrives slowly, almost as if it were rising from the land itself. The plane floats over the outback. The desert stretches endlessly beneath them. For a few minutes the film stops being a story and becomes something else entirely — a meditation on distance, longing, and the strange human desire to see and be seen.

It’s one of those rare moments where cinema and music fuse perfectly.

The soundtrack surrounding that moment is one of the most unusual ever assembled. When Wenders commissioned the music for the film, he asked the participating artists to imagine the kind of songs they might be making ten years in the future. The film itself was set slightly ahead of its time, so the idea was that these musicians would try to anticipate their own sound in the coming decade.

The lineup was absurdly strong: Lou Reed, R.E.M., Nick Cave, Depeche Mode, Talking Heads, U2, and others. It reads almost like a summit meeting of late-twentieth-century alternative music.

The idea was that they would create future music.

But artists rarely predict the future.

What they tend to do instead is deepen the present.

Listening to the soundtrack today, what you mostly hear is 1991 at its most imaginative. The musicians push their sound slightly outward into darker, more atmospheric territory, but they’re still working with the tools they had.

And the tools were 1991.

Still, several of the songs are outstanding. What’s Good is classic Lou Reed: dry, philosophical, slightly amused by the whole strange business of being alive. Reed had an unmatched ability to deliver lines that sound both cynical and strangely tender. At one point he sings, “life’s like bacon and ice cream / that’s what life’s like without you,” which somehow manages to be both ridiculous and oddly moving at the same time.

Then there is Until the End of the World by U2, written during the band’s remarkable early-1990s creative surge. The song carries the darker propulsion of the Achtung Baby era and hints at the experimental atmosphere the band would later explore more fully on albums like Zooropa and the Passengers project. The lyrics, told from the perspective of Judas speaking to Jesus after the betrayal, give the song an almost Biblical scale.

But the emotional summit of the whole enterprise remains Gabriel’s Blood of Eden.

When that song arrives during the silent glide over the Australian desert, the movie suddenly lifts into another register. The wandering plot, the strange technology, the global chase — all of it falls away for a moment, leaving only the image of two people floating above the earth while Gabriel sings about the ancient longing between man and woman.

The future, it turns out, rarely sounds like the future.

It usually sounds like the present imagining what might come next.

Dedication:

For Lou. What’s good baby?