The Longest Science Fiction Ever Made #SciFiSunday

Republished By Plato

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When a movie is over 5 hours long, it can’t quite be one genre. Wim Wenders’ cult classic from 1999 Until the End of the World is a near-future science fiction story, an epic road trip, a slow-burn indie love story, a fin de siècle meditation, and a political commentary all at once. It also has one of the greatest soundtracks of the 90s. Here’s more from Critereon:

You can sense this openness, this anxious awe at the vastness of the world, in every globe-hopping minute of Until the End of the World. Wenders famously reached out to twenty of his favorite international musical acts to contribute a song they might imagine themselves playing in the year 1999. Almost all of them accepted the challenge, and he wound up with an epoch-defining rock soundtrack, which could be heard only in bizarre snippets in the shortened version but is allowed to breathe in the full director’s cut, where the music becomes just as much a part of the aura of the film as its images. Meanwhile, Robby Müller’s colorful, eclectic cinematography incorporates multiple shooting formats and styles—from shadowy noir to urban grit to placid naturalism to elegant classicism to pixelated techno fuzz and more. Wenders was one of the world’s foremost filmmakers at the dawn of the nineties, but he also had a (not entirely fair) reputation for making grim, angst-ridden movies—reflecting the stereotype of the bespectacled, black-clad German artiste. Until the End of the World, however, feels like the work of a free man, working in a newly free world.

Wenders told the Los Angeles Times during production: “This is not a science-fiction film. It’s a contemporary film that we set ten years into the future so we could take a few liberties.” He took more than a few, and many of them turned out to be strikingly prescient. The characters drive cars guided by navigation systems not unlike today’s GPS. The internet had only just begun to be commercially available at the time Until the End of the World was made, but the movie accurately portrays the use of search engines, as well as our ability to find people anywhere on earth thanks to their digital footprints. Even the film’s framing device, involving worldwide panic over an Indian satellite crashing on the eve of the millennium and wiping out all electronic communications, makes for an interesting analogue to the very real fear many had in 1999 and the years leading up to it that the Y2K bug would plunge a technologically reliant planet back into the Stone Age.

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