Until the End of the World
| Until the End of the World | |
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| Directed by | Wim Wenders |
| Produced by | Ulrich Felsberg Jonathan Taplin |
| Screenplay by | Wim Wenders Peter Carey |
| Story by | Wim Wenders Solveig Dommartin |
| Starring | |
| Music by | Graeme Revell |
| Cinematography | Robby Müller |
| Edited by | Peter Przygodda |
| Distributed by | Warner Bros. |
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Release date
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Running time
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158 minutes |
| Country | Germany France Australia United States |
| Language | English French German Italian Japanese |
| Budget | $23 million |
| Box office | $752,856 |
Until the End of the World (German: Bis ans Ende der Welt) is a 1991 French-German science fiction drama film by the German film director Wim Wenders; the screenplay was written by Wenders and Peter Carey, from a story by Wenders and Solveig Dommartin. An initial draft of the screenplay was written by American filmmaker Michael Almereyda. Wenders, whose career had been distinguished by his mastery of the road movie, had intended this as the Ultimate Road Movie.
In late 1999, an orbiting Indian nuclear satellite is out of control and predicted to re-enter the atmosphere, threatening unknown populated areas of the Earth. Mass populations trying to flee the likely impact sites cause a worldwide panic. Caught in a traffic jam and suffering from boredom, Claire Tourneur escapes the highway congestion by taking a side road. When she gets into a car crash with a pair of bank robbers, they enlist her to carry their stolen cash to Paris. Along the way, she meets a man being pursued by an armed party who introduces himself as Trevor McPhee, and allows him to travel to Paris with her. After reaching the house of her estranged lover, Eugene, Claire discovers that Trevor has stolen some of the money.
Claire then travels to Berlin and hires missing persons detective Phillip Winter to help her find Trevor through tracking his passport and credit card — he agrees to help when he finds out Trevor has a substantial bounty on his head. However, when Claire meets Trevor for lunch, she betrays Winter and attempts to escape with Trevor. Winter catches the two making love in a motel room, after which Trevor handcuffs them to the bed and escapes with more of Claire's money. Winter, Claire and Eugene meet in Moscow to continue the search, and find out from Moscow bounty hunters that Trevor is actually Sam Farber, wanted for stealing the prototype of a secret research project. Multiple government agencies and freelance bounty hunters are chasing him to recover the device. Winter quits the job, intimidated by the even larger bounty on Sam's head, but Eugene buys a tracking computer to help Claire. However, when the computer finds Sam's location, she leaves Eugene while she thinks he is sleeping.
Following Sam on the Trans-Siberian Railway, she travels through China and reaches Japan, where she rescues Winter from a botched capture attempt at a capsule hotel. She finds Sam at a pachinko parlor rapidly losing his eyesight, and buys them train tickets to a random mountain inn. There, Sam reveals that the stolen prototype belongs to his father, Henry Farber and is a device for recording and translating brain impulses. He has been recording places and people around the world for his blind mother, Edith Jeanne Moreau, but the recordings are exhausting his eyes. After the innkeeper heals Sam's eyes, he and Claire fly to San Francisco to take more recordings before heading to the Australian outback, where his father's laboratory is.
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