Until the End of the World (German: Bis ans Ende der Welt; French: Jusqu'au bout du monde) is a 1991 epic science fiction drama film directed by Wim Wenders. Set at the turn of the millennium in the shadow of a world-changing catastrophe, the film follows a man and woman, played by William Hurt and Solveig Dommartin, as they are pursued across the globe, in a plot involving a device that can record visual experiences and visualize dreams. An initial draft of the screenplay was written by American filmmaker Michael Almereyda, but the final screenplay is credited to Wenders and Australian novelist Peter Carey, from a story by Wenders and Dommartin. Wenders, whose career had been distinguished by his exploration of the road movie, intended this as the ultimate example of the genre. The film has been released in several editions, ranging in length from 158 to 287 minutes.
Plot
Act 1 In 1999, panic ensues when an orbiting Indian nuclear satellite begins to spiral toward Earth. Claire Tourneur, who has been traveling around Europe trying unsuccessfully to distract herself after discovering that her boyfriend Eugene slept with her best friend, is unconcerned by the impending nuclear disaster though her sleep has been troubled by a recurring nightmare. When she gets stuck in a traffic jam in Southern France after it is projected as a possible impact site, she takes a side road and encounters a pair of friendly bank robbers who enlist her to carry their stolen cash to Paris in exchange for a cut of the loot. En route to Paris, Claire meets Trevor McPhee and agrees to let him travel with her to the city to escape an armed man named Burt who is following him. After parting ways in Paris, Claire discovers Trevor took some of the stolen money while she slept. Claire crosses paths with Burt and finds out that he is going to Berlin. She makes the trip as well and hires missing-persons detective Phillip Winter to help her locate Trevor. The detective reveals that Trevor has a bounty on his head for stealing a big opal from a mining syndicate in Australia, and has just boarded a flight to Lisbon. When Claire and Winter catch up with Trevor, Winter handcuffs Trevor to Claire, but she voluntarily goes along with Trevor when he runs away. They go to a hotel, where Winter finds them having sex, though Trevor is able to handcuff both Winter and Claire to the bed and escape with more of Claire's money. Still after the bounty, Winter takes Claire with him to Moscow where they meet up with Eugene, whom Claire has asked to bring her more money. A local bounty hunter helps them discover that Trevor's real name is Sam Farber, he is wanted by the U.S. government for industrial espionage, and he has a significantly larger bounty on his head than Trevor McPhee does. Winter says he is quitting the job and going home, and Eugene buys a tracking computer to help Claire, who sees Burt again and learns that Sam is wanted for stealing a camera he had helped develop at a lab in Palo Alto. When Sam buys a ticket to Beijing on the Trans-Siberian Railway, the computer alerts Claire and she leaves Eugene while she thinks he is sleeping. Sam evades Claire, and she ends up traveling through China alone for months. She finally calls Eugene, who tells her to go to Tokyo and meets her there. They go to the capsule hotel where Sam is supposed to be staying, only to find a tied-up Winter and an ambush of bounty hunters and international government agents, tipped off by the bounty hunter from Moscow. Claire escapes and stumbles upon Sam, who is rapidly losing his eyesight, at a pachinko parlor. She buys them train tickets to a random mountain inn, where the kindly innkeepers provide herbs that heal Sam's eyes. Sam reveals to Claire that the prototype camera he stole was invented by his father, Henry, and is a device that, by recording brain impulses of the photographer for later transfer, takes pictures blind people can see. Though the recording process is hard on his eyes, he has been traveling around the world making recordings of places and people that are important to his mother, Edith, who is blind, so she can see them. The next stop on Sam's itinerary is San Francisco. He and Claire are robbed by a used car salesman shortly after arriving, so Claire calls Chico, one of the French bank robbers, for more money. Sam cannot get the camera to work when he is trying to make a recording of his sister and niece, so Claire takes over. The final recording done, Sam, Claire, and Chico board a small boat to Australia, where Sam's parents are.
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