For all its end-of-the-millennium momentousness, for all its science-fictional gadgetry and threat of nuclear holocaust, for all its furtive fugitives and government agents and rhyming, harmonica-playing private eye ("To be effective, you need a detective"), for all its almost complete circumnavigation of the globe, and for all its two and three-quarters hours in length, this is a remarkably modest undertaking, a vision of the future with the field of view delimited to less than a decade, a chase movie geared down to the pace of a road movie. The apparent modesty is perhaps in part an optical illusion of the mastery of control. The director, Wim Wenders (middle name: Weltschmerz), is a virtuoso of those two most elusive cinematic properties, tone and mood, in his case an easily downed and easily digested admixture of modernistic coolness and nostalgic romanticism, both elements equally enervating, together almost paralyzing. (In blurbese: "haunting," "hypnotic.") The SF aspects -- the traditional underground lab, the computerized tracking devices with their very amusing video-game graphics, and of course the pivotal "invention," a camera that can record and transmit mental images, or anyway spotty, pointillist renderings of them -- have helped to put the Wenders coolness back in balance, after the Wenders romanticism somewhat swamped it in his prior two movies, Wings of Desire and Paris, Texas. They reassert, in the most literal way, a sense of distance, detachment, disaffection, against which that wistful romanticism can affectingly tug. William Hurt, Solveig Dommartin, Max Von Sydow, Jeanne Moreau. (1991) — Duncan Shepherd
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