Bloated runtimes of feature films (such as Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon”) have become the norm in recent years. Movies that would’ve been 90-100 minutes long 10 or 15 years ago are now clocking in at around two hours, while flicks that would’ve stopped around two hours in previous decades are now creeping closer and closer to the three-hour mark. Supposedly, this recent trend is all in the name of creative freedom, giving filmmakers the liberty to go longer and deeper in their storytelling, which often backfires and lessens the appeal for the audience to see the movie. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’d been put off seeing certain films because of their imposing length, even though I was generally interested in what they had to offer, story-wise and otherwise.
That’s not to say this is an entirely new thing that never happened in the history of cinema. But when you watched long epics like Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” — which you should see in 4K, too — Sergio Leone’s four-hour gangster-drama, “Once Upon a Time in America,” or Kevin Costner’s “Dances With Wolves,” you felt a certain weight and purpose to them that usually justified their commanding durations. That said, Wim Wenders’ 1991 sci-fi flop, “Until the End of the World” — or rather its Director’s Cut that clocks in at 287 minutes — feels like an unnecessarily extreme and indulgent example of creative authority.
An obscure sci-fi road trip for patient genre fans
Warner Bros.
Director Wenders, who’s responsible for such ’70s and ’80s classics as “The American Friend, “Paris, Texas,” or “Wings of Desire,” made “Until the End of the World” as an attempt to create the ultimate road movie. The film follows a heartbroken young woman, Claire (Solveig Dommartin), and a mysterious man named Sam (William Hurt), also known as Trevor, in the near future after an Indian satellite spirals out of orbit and heads rapidly towards Earth. After some quasi-noir elements of stolen money, a Private Detective, and some dangerous bad guys, the two practically end up globetrotting together and falling in love in the process until Wenders finally reveals what his movie is really about.
The most impressive quality of the film is its making, which took Wenders and Co. to more than a dozen cities in eight countries and four continents, eventually wrapping up filming after five months. However, the result of this massive undertaking didn’t translate to the big screen, as “Until the End of the World” was a critical and commercial failure upon release in 1991. Against its estimated $23 million production cost, the movie only grossed $835 thousand worldwide at the box office, ending up as a total bomb. Critics weren’t kind to the theatrical version that ran 157 minutes, either; Wenders was forced by his financial backers to trim his formidable 20-hour cut of the film to a standard feature length. But after the director and his editor secretly completed a five-hour-long Director’s Cut a year later, “Until the End of the World” has received a much-needed re-evaluation from both critics and viewers and has since become a cult classic among sci-fi fans. The extensive Director’s Cut is now available on the special-edition Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.
