The cinematography is beautiful... the soundtrack is near-perfect... the director's vision is unique... for the first two-thirds of the film, I was hooked. But then it all goes wrong.
Wim Wenders creates an intriguing universe for his characters to inhabit-- a science-fictional 1999 imagined during the heady days of German reunification. It's a somewhat creepy techno-globalized and paranoid world facing an uncertain future, with an out-of-control Indian nuclear satellite looming ominously in the sky. Solveig Dommartin plays a flighty and impulsive femme fatale, who stalks a mysterious loner (William Hurt) across the bleak futuristic landscape, one step ahead of a ragtag assortment of bounty hunters, oddball bank robbers, and an ex-boyfriend (Sam Neill) who narrates. The moody, scenic, slow-building style is quintessential Wenders, and it's possibly his finest work.
But once we reach the promised "end of the world", in the Australian outback, the film takes a sharp left turn into third-rate psychodrama and ultimately comes unglued, with a long, dragging denouement that should have been cut entirely. The film clocks in at roughly three hours, but it feels more like four.
Fans of Wenders' other works should definitely check this one out, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone else.
Wim Wenders creates an intriguing universe for his characters to inhabit-- a science-fictional 1999 imagined during the heady days of German reunification. It's a somewhat creepy techno-globalized and paranoid world facing an uncertain future, with an out-of-control Indian nuclear satellite looming ominously in the sky. Solveig Dommartin plays a flighty and impulsive femme fatale, who stalks a mysterious loner (William Hurt) across the bleak futuristic landscape, one step ahead of a ragtag assortment of bounty hunters, oddball bank robbers, and an ex-boyfriend (Sam Neill) who narrates. The moody, scenic, slow-building style is quintessential Wenders, and it's possibly his finest work.
But once we reach the promised "end of the world", in the Australian outback, the film takes a sharp left turn into third-rate psychodrama and ultimately comes unglued, with a long, dragging denouement that should have been cut entirely. The film clocks in at roughly three hours, but it feels more like four.
Fans of Wenders' other works should definitely check this one out, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone else.