From: tmaddox@milton.u.washington.edu (Tom Maddox)
Subject: Re: TO THE END OF THE WORLD and LAWNMOWER MAN:  Film Reviews?
Date: Tue, 28 Jan 1992 08:29:55 GMT
Organization: The Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington



In article <1992Jan27.164941.27206@milton.u.washington.edu> cyberoid@milton.
u.washington.edu (Robert Jacobson) writes:

>Wim Wenders's new film, TO THE END OF THE WORLD, is widely being touted
>as the successor to 1983's BRAINSTORMS as the film most suggestive of
>what virtual worlds are all about.  Reviews are welcome!

        I may be wrong, but I doubt that the movie will offer much to either
the usual sf audience or the hard-core techie/technophile.  _Until the End of 
the World_ has very little, if anything, to do with VR.

	The first half of the film has some nicely rendered ~1999 effects,
mostly involving cleanly extrapolated technologies:  tv phones, computer
searches over large, networked databases, etc.   And it makes some interesting
moves with the notion of a camera that stores visual images as they are 
perceived in the eye/brain and so can make them available to the blind--a
couple of Gibsonian "'trode" setups being implausibly the medium of 
communication.

	It has a long second part that explores "image sickness"--a condition 
resulting from excessive immersion in technologically rendered imagery--and one
that many people on this group actively seek.  

	The central danger hanging over the world--a nuclear satellite out of 
control--is portrayed as having both possible and actual effects that even to 
this untechnical person seem unrealistic at best, massively wrong at worst.

	The central moral terrain the film explores concerns technological
invasions into our inner lives--our dreams and memories, primarily.  Its 
position is clear, development interesting, conclusions questionable.

				Tom Maddox
			tmaddox@milton.u.washington.edu
	"The possibilities are endless.  I plan to hide in the woods."
				Gordon Fitch