REVIEW: UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD (1991)

I'm getting into writing reviews now, and I probably shouldn't. 
After all they seem like a particular waste of time to write if 
nobody's paying. Sure I feel like that about most of the time I 
spend writing here, but just doing so to talk about what someone 
else made, it's subservient to another work before it's even begun. 
Even if I hate the work I'm reviewing, at least its creator 
bothered to spend their time making something, and if people cared 
for what I thought then they'd pay for it, or ought to if I wasn't 
dumb enough to give it to them for free while I sit here under two 
blankets rubbing my hands to keep warm because I don't want to pay 
the cost of electricity for running the heating. Only an idiot 
would waste his time doing that when he's got a long list of urgent 
jobs for the weekend which can theoretically benefit him physically 
for days to years in the future. Not to mention he's been spending 
time typing at a keyboard all week already coding/debugging 
endlessly, mostly one bug where writing to a global variable with 
_definitely_, _verifiably_, _inevitably_, the same value, but only 
when within a separate function call, causes a hardware module in 
the microcontroller to somehow get confused. Some sort of compiler 
optimisation gone wrong? _Another_ memory overflow due to an 
implied integer conversion that the compiler unexpectedly failed to 
handle correctly in a completely separate part of the code? I don't 
care anymore, frankly, that variable didn't need to be written 
again with the same value, and now, after much re-engineering, it 
isn't. But now next week I'm still at the point where I expected to 
be by Tuesday and I haven't got more time so I'll have to pause 
that project yet again.

Huff, well there's me suddenly venting again like a steam train 
arriving at a station. What's a lighter topic to ramble about? I 
know, I'll review a film I've watched...

UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD (1991)

What does it mean when the front cover of the VHS rental release 
for a two and a half hour science-fiction drama sells itself with a 
long list of sixteen bands who recorded the film's soundtrack? In 
fact it's not really a never-ending music video, but it doesn't 
really have the narrative of a typical film either. Something about 
this movie by filmmaker Wim Wenders does follow more of an emotive 
state of mind akin to a long musical work, than the clarity of 
purpose one expects in cinema. That is to say, the plot leaves 
intercontinental dead ends willfully wherever it goes across 
countries and continents in the barely-followable course of its 
road trip narrative.

Pehaps this is improved in the five-hour director's cut which is 
apparantly now available online, although some reviews suggest that 
this isn't the case, but working as usual just from what the 1990s 
home entertainment industry left for me, I'm only going from the 
original cut. This original vision of a free-spirited woman 
following a wanted man across a pre-apocalyptic globe while being 
followed by her boyfriend and a detective whose motivations are 
about as clear as his fate at the end of the movie, somehow seems a 
good fit for what I feel is the general Gopherspace audience. I'm 
probably wrong, but there are some themes in this movie that just 
made me think "Huh, Gopher would like that" (yes reader, I pretty 
much see you as a component of the protocol). Of course there's the 
near-future setting, 1999 seen from 1991, which in an excuse for 
ample quaint not-quite-on-the-mark tech gadgets starting with a 
sat-nav that guides the leading woman through the title sequence in 
an old Rover, then onto a variety of somewhat less accurate tech 
predictions which are nevertheless entertaining. To this end the 
Russian bear computer has to get some sort of special mention 
because that surely deserves an award for the most hillariously 
ridiculous bit of future tech ever appearing in a scene of 
otherwise unflinching seriousness. I'm guessing it was a substitute 
for actually filming in Moscow, which they clearly failed to 
achieve since it was right at the time of the Russian communist 
government's collapse, but a 3D animation of a giant talking bear 
walking around the city's famous landmarks? OK so any 3D computer 
animation circa 1991 was cool, but what level of intoxication makes 
_that_ animation seem like a serious alternative to a few location 
shots?

But in spite of that, the movie actually predicts, rather more 
accurately than the tech itself, a sense of unease about how future 
technology would shape the world. There's definately a pervading 
theme of technology contributing to a destruction of the world that 
the film is moving through, though this exists more in the 
narrative than seen in any of the actual scenes. It's most 
obviously embodied in the background news reports, never 
acknowledged by the main characters, of an out-of-control 
nuclear-armed war satellite set to trigger Armageddon at any 
moment. But more facinating today is the rather separate story in 
the last third of the movie where, cut off from the world in the 
middle of the Australian outback, the leading woman, more 
disillusioned than ever, falls victim to the addictive power of a 
portable electronic tablet device with which people can replay 
their own dreams to themselves. Today this strikes me as a perfect 
metaphore for the population's addiction to smartphones and the 
echo-chamber of social media reflecting their own thoughts back at 
them. I'm not crediting the movie with predicting the rise of 
social media, the dream replaying is obviously supposed to 
represent drug addiction, and the script actually seems to have 
wholely missed predicting anything like the internet - it doesn't 
even show anything like a BBS. But even as a fluke, I think it 
makes an otherwise somewhat dry end theme on drug addiction and 
recovery far more interesting to modern eyes, at least provided 
you're skeptical enough about social media to see the connection 
today.

Overall this movie is a long way from perfect, but as I've said 
before sometimes even a movie that's not quite right (or worse) is 
just different enough from the average hollywood nonsense to make 
up for its flaws. Throw in the occasional taste of retro sci-fi 
nerd tech, and a story that sometimes feels like it's almost about 
to tell us something genuinely important today, and I think this 
film's a pretty good fit for the sort of audience that might hang 
around here on Gopher. Oh yeah, that and the music is really good.

 - The Free Thinker