The longest science fiction film in history lasts almost 5 hours and failed in theaters… in its ‘light’ version. The Director’s Cut of Until the End of the World

As tradition dictates, and despite having been released on Netflix, Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon will have two alternative versions that promise to be very different from the two films in the fantasy and science fiction saga seen so far. At a minimum, each of them will have an hour more of additional footage in what promises to be a much more bizarre and adult-oriented montage. But today we are not here to talk to you about the American filmmaker, but about another film of the genreis much slower, released 30 years ago with a Director’s Cut.

Before getting into the matter, a summary of the tape tape. Until the End of the World (Bis ans Ende der Welt in its original version in German) was a $22 million blockbuster, a boon for the time and the non-commercial scope of its premise, which led the viewer to be a participant for nearly five hours of one road movie by a gloomy and futuristic very technological worldat least compared to 1991 in which the film originally debuted in theaters, with Solveig Dommartin, Sam Neill, William Hurt and Max von Sydow in its cast.

“Year 1999. While she is driving, a woman collides with criminals who have just robbed a bank and who force her to collaborate with them in transferring the money to a place in Paris. Along the way, she meets Sam, a fugitive pursued by the CIA, who explains to her that the crimes they accuse him of are false and that what they really want is to take him away. an invention of his father that allows dreams to be recorded“. — Synopsis of Until the End of the World

Until the End of the World was launched, as we said, in 1991, ending up being a gigantic failure. A good part of the press did not like it, and it barely managed to raise just over $752,000 despite a costly investment, being forgotten very quickly by the audience, although Its soundtrack was a success. (with songs by U2, Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel, Nick Cave, etc.). However, the story behind this feature film had only just begun.

The project of a lifetime

Until the end of the world was and is the project of a lifetime for Wim Wenders, its director. The idea began to mature more than 10 years before its launch, in 1977, but it was not until he received some good press in the industry that he was able to obtain enough financing to develop such an ambitious work. But no matter how much name it had already made in theaters at that time, no one in Hollywood was going to be crazy enough to release such a long movie. Thus, and although it had an initial assembly of 20 hours, he was forced to market it in the United States in a “reader’s digest version” (or abridged version) of 158 minutes. In Europe, in turn, we were able to see something more, 179 minutes. More than an hour less compared to the duration of the Director’s Cuts that we are talking about today in this topic.

Wenders reluctantly agreed to cut his film to such an extent, and he did so for a good reason that he explained years later: to take a copy of his work:

“The ideal film, the one I wanted to make, lasted just under five hours. I tried in vain to convince my partners to agree to release it in two parts. Everyone insisted on their contracts. I had to agree to deliver what I knew was going to be a disastrous Reader’s Digest of my film. But I decided I’d rather do it myself than let someone else destroy it. And that was useful. Because when my editor and I had the ideal version, we saved it, we made a copy of that working copy and then we kept cutting the film into pieces until we got to acceptable footage.” Wenders via Valture

Of course, having a copy of the footage that you can work on in your free time is not enough to release a film of such magnitude. “Because the original cut had had so many flaws and had performed so poorly at the box office, no one wanted to release the longer version” and the Director’s Cut of Until the End of the World was postponed for more than two decades, when The Criterion Collection released a restored 4K edition of this 4 hour 47 minute montage. If you are interested in seeing it, you can do it in Spain through Tivify and through acontra+.

Via | Espinof

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