Return of the Obra Dinn

Let's have a look at Return of the Obra Dinn, a modern remake of the classic Apple Macintosh original. Obra Dinn was originally published for the Macintosh back in 1991 by TáltoSoft, an educational software company based in Hungary with a sideline in point and click adventures. Their other titles included Voyage of the Obra Dinn and the sci-fi-themed Arc of Orion. They were part of a small group of OG black-and-white Macintosh games that attracted attention in the non-Macintosh world, along with Glider and Shufflepuck Cafe and Uninvited, which it superficially resembled.

You know, I can remember the first time I used an Apple Macintosh. It was in the early 1990s, when they were still called Macintoshes. They're officially called Macs now. When did that happen? 1999, apparently. But when I was young they were Macintoshes. "The Apple Macintosh", that's what they were called.

My high school bought a room of Mac Classics in order to teach us about desktop publishing, which was the style at the time. The Classic was essentially a cost-reduced, memory-expanded update of the original all-in-one Macintosh, at the low, low price of around £700. The Macintosh platform had gone colour a few years before, and objectively the Classic was inferior to the Atari ST or Commodore Amiga that some of the posher kids had at home, but oh, that black and white screen.

The tiny, pin-sharp, 9" black and white screen. 512 pixels wide. 512 sharp pixels, much sharper than the fuzzy, wobbly pixels of a television display. As a games machine the Macintosh wasn't much cop, and I have no recollection of playing Obra Dinn from back in the day, but I remember reading about it.

A few years ago an indie developer called Lucas Pope had a big hit with Papers, Please, a point-and-click game with a retro feel. It owed a lot to the icon-driven 8-bit adventures of the 1980s, in which the player had to sift through files to work out whodunnit. I'm thinking of Vera Cruz, The Fourth Protocol, Killed Until Dead and so forth.

Four icon-driven adventures from the 1980s - clockwise from top left, Vera Cruz, Killed Until Dead, Kobayashi Maru, Zombi.

The icon-driven "remember-em-up" is one of those long-dead genres that made sense at the time - pre-internet, when people bought one game every few months and were prepared to spend hours mastering it - but wouldn't work nowadays. And yet Papers, Please struck a chord, and several million sales later Pope got hold of the rights to Return of the Obra Dinn and rebuilt it with Unity. The remaster came out in 2018 for the PC and the Macintosh.

I played it on my Mac Pro, because why not:

The original had static images, but the remaster is in full 3D, although it has the same stark black-and-white-with-dithering look. This mostly works, although as the developer points out the effect doesn't scale very well. It also compresses poorly, so I imagine the screenshots in this article look odd.

The original packaging included a number of Infocom-style feelies that doubled as copy protection. The remaster incorporates the drawings into the game itself:

The remaster also has a MIDI-fied update of the original chiptune soundtrack, which sounds uncannily like Michael Nyman's mid-80s music for Peter Greenaway. It also includes Voyage and Arc as free bonuses, although they haven't been remastered (as far as I can tell they use the original data running on an emulator). I admit I haven't played them; Voyage is apparently a prototype of Return, and Arc takes place in one of those sci-fi universes where a television is a tele-visor and language has been weirded by verbing.

On a technical level the game runs perfectly fine on my Mac Pro, which is unsurprising given that the machine is a supercomputer in comparison to the OG Macintosh. The game is capped at sixty frames per second. It doesn't have separate sliders for sound effects, speech, and music, which is a shame because the music is generally a lot louder than the dialogue.

Can you redefine the keys? No, you cannot. Is it specially optimised for VR? No, although the game could easily be made to work in that medium. The engine apparently runs at 800x450, scaled to fit the monitor, which might explain why the between-chapter subtitles look so odd. There are a handful of graphics options, although they're essentially just filters:

What is Return of the Obra Dinn? It's a murder mystery set in 1807. A mass-murder mystery that owes a huge debt to the tale of the Marie Celeste. Which was found abandoned in 1872, which means that Arthur Conan Doyle was actually plagiarising Obra Dinn, not the other way around. Checkmate, Arthur Conan Doyle. Checkmate.

The player is an insurance inspector who has been asked to find out why the Obra Dinn vanished. It departed from London in 1802, stopped at Falmouth to take on cargo, then set sail for the Far East. But it never arrived, apparently disappearing somewhere off the Atlantic coast of Africa. Five years later it drifts back to Falmouth, crewed only by the dead.

Rah! I'm a monstah!

The game has a magical realist tone. For the most part it's grounded in reality, with no supernatural elements. The exception is the insurance inspector's pocket watch, the memento mortem, which can transport the inspector to the moment of a corpse's death - but only as a static tableaux. The inspector can walk around the scene and study things, but everything is frozen in time. Ultimately the inspector's task is to put names to faces and work out who did what to whom and why and when.

Or names to skulls, whatever. Names to splashes of goo, because Obra Dinn is surprisingly nasty in places, especially for a video game from 1991. A few years earlier CRL's Jack the Ripper attracted enough controversy here in the UK to be awarded an 18 Certificate by the BBFC, but the controversy was an exercise in marketing, and nobody remembers Jack the Ripper otherwise.

In contrast Obra Dinn isn't sensationalist at all, and the violence is portrayed as genuinely unpleasant rather than exciting or shocking. I'm not sure if the monochrome dithering makes it less nasty, or more nasty.

At the same time I wonder if Obra Dinn benefited from a certain amount of class-ism. Back in 1991 the Macintosh was an expensive machine sold exclusively to the right sort of people. Well-off middle-class people. The kind of cultured, knowledgeable people who could be trusted to own a copy of American Psycho without turning into an actual psycho, or a copy of Lolita without turning into Jimmy Savile, because middle-class people can control their animal urges whereas lower-class people cannot. They are not drug addicts, they are pharmacological explorers. That kind of thing. I wonder if Obra Dinn benefited from that. Who knows. I'm digressing here.

The game involves listening carefully to the dialogue and studying the scenes intently to work out who is who. In the scene above the victim is referred to as a Dane, and Lars Linde is the only Danish member of the crew, so he must be the victim. And even if it wasn't the club that killed him - perhaps he hit his head on the deck - he obviously did die, because his corpse is there in the present day, and the game is forgiving enough to accept any reasonably plausible cause of death, so "clubbed" it is.

But who is the killer? The assailant mentions having a brother, and there are a handful of names in the crew manifest that appear to be related to each other, but which one is he? I'll have to do more detective work. Perhaps I could match his movements up with a map of the ship to see if he sleeps in a certain cabin, or perhaps he hangs out with someone I have already identified. Maybe someone identifies him in one of the other memories where he is a background character.

One thing the game doesn't ask for is the motive. The insurance company doesn't care if the killing was morally justified, only that it happened. At the end of the game the company rewards and fines the crew based on the strict letter of the law, which is unfair, and is presented as unfair, but such was life at sea in the 1800s.

Dinn attracted positive reviews for essentially three reasons. Firstly the clever design. The game is fundamentally a slideshow, because it was implemented with HyperCard, which had huge limitations. Unlike almost every other adventure game the player doesn't have an inventory and can't interact with the world, only observe. The remaster adds animations for opening doors and climbing ladders, but the environment is otherwise completely static and non-interactive because HyperCard couldn't cope with state changes.

But the study-the-scene gameplay cleverly disguises the game's fundamental nature as a bunch of frozen images, and it never really shows through. The game never feels like a technical kludge.

Some images from the original 1991 release. As mentioned up the page the remaster embeds the original paper diary into the game, whereas the 1991 original had a simple interface that encouraged you to fill out the diary with a pencil. The reliance on feelies might explain why the game was never reissued as a budget title, and within a few years the Macintosh had a completely different technical architecture and operating system (and then again a few years after that (and after that)).

The second positive aspect is the finely-balanced difficult level. My recollection of text adventures from the late 1980s, early 1990s is that they were a massive pain. The likes of Corruption were full of massive logical leaps. They also had an annoying fetish for time-based puzzles whereby the player had to be in location X at exactly 11:30 on Day Three in order to hear the baddies talk amongst themselves otherwise it was game over ten turns later. It still makes me frumple to this day. When you have... when you have that level of granularity it's not a game any more, it's... it's a Microsoft Teams meeting, it's a flowchart, a chore. It's not fun. No-one wants to spend half an hour playing an adventure game only to lose because you were supposed to feed some cheese to a mouse thirty turns ago.

Obra Dinn on the other hand is unlose-able. You can't mess it up. Some of the detective work is obtuse, but the game is on the player's side. In the copy-protection image further up the page the helmsman is the man holding the helm. That's him. There's no trick. When one of the mates is shown walking with a younger chap who has a plate of food, the younger chap is that mate's steward. The chap sitting in bunk #51 is chap #51 on the crew manifest etc.

I hit a brick wall mid-way through the game, but I slowly chipped away at it, and eventually I worked out the topmen and stewards by a process of elimination. Of the two women that remained, Miss X was the one without the wedding ring, because in 1807 unmarried women were called Miss.

If you make a wrong guess you can change it later on. The game only locks in the answers if they're correct. And if you guess correctly - and it's just a random guess you couldn't possibly have deduced - the game doesn't mind, although it does warn you in advance. As a consequence you could in theory brute-force the entire game, although it would take forever. The game locks in identifies when the player gets three combinations of victim, crime, and perpetrator correct, so brute-force-guessing is only really plausible when there are only a few people left, at which point the game doesn't mind if you rush the ending.

The big downside is that the game has no replayability value. If you know the answers in advance you can in theory just enter them straightaway, solving the game in under a minute, or however long it takes you to click one-hundred-and-eighty times or so (there are sixty people in the cast).

The story is told in reverse order, beginning with the final confrontation and working back to the beginning. And then forward again to about two-thirds of the way through the story, at which point the ending makes more sense. I think the developers made it that way so they could put the big action sequence near the beginning, and then they ran with the idea.

It suffers a bit from being prosaic. Without wishing to spoil things, the story begins with a few accidental deaths that put the crew on edge. Fearing some kind of curse they start to turn on each other. In particular they turn on the passengers, including some VIPs from what was then called Formosa, now Taiwan. Following a series of murders and a botched kidnapping everything falls apart, culminating in a disaster that leads to a mutiny.

It has emotional power, because with only a couple of exceptions the crew are good people put into an impossible situation. But the characterisation is perhaps understandably spartan, given that there are sixty castmembers, and so although I felt sorry for some of the characters I never really developed an emotional bond with them. In particular the Captain is presented as the main character, but he spends the first three-quarters of the story as a bystander, and by the time of his dramatic end I didn't know a great deal about him. But on the other hand each of the sixty characters stands out, so the developers mostly succeeded at a difficult task.

On a fundamental level Obra Dinn is just a murder-mystery, with no pretensions to any great message. This separates it from modern art games such as Journey or The Talos Principle, in the sense that it isn't really about anything. I left the game with a sense of sadness, because most of the victims died for nothing, but after a few days it has already started to fade from the memory, whereas I still think about The Talos Principle occasionally, because it had something to say about life and death.

There is one quasi-supernatural aspect. The crew's fate is sealed when a giant and possibly sex-starved octopus takes a fancy to the Obra Dinn's svelte lines and seductive mainbraces etc during a huge storm. But even then the story implies that the octopus attack is either an illusion borne of collective panic, or at the very least wildly exaggerated. In particular none of the crew are directly killed by the octopus. They're either lost overboard or crushed by falling rigging or poorly-secured cannon. The game implies that the ship was hit by a lightning storm at exactly the wrong time, causing the crew to go into a panic that doomed the ship.

So ultimately Obra Dinn is a clever piece of design with a gripping story that feels hollow, but when it works it's dead smart. It post-dated LucasArts' Secret of Monkey Island by a year and has the same frustration-free gameplay - the developers wanted the player to experience mystery and wonder and not e.g. crushing frustration and impotent rage. It has aged extremely well, and the visual style is striking. But the story is prosaic, and it would have been nice if Pope and his team had perhaps expanded some of the original text. Or at least tweaked a couple of the clues so that they were less annoying.

Now, as an indie labour of love I don't want to go too hard on Obra Dinn. The original had dialogue captions, but the remaster adds voice acting. Apparently the Formosans are spot-on. They sound exactly like upper-class Formosans from 1807. I assume Pope was terrified of the kind of "in da fresh" pseudo-Chinese voice acting that was common right up until the 2000s.

Unfortunately the rest of the cast have the unmistakeable cadence of software engineers. In particular the Captain, who has in theory spent at least forty years shouting commands while at sea, sounds like a senior software engineer who is annoyed that his team has been working on the wrong build. It strikes me that the game would have had a harder impact with professional voice actors. But perhaps it's an ironic homage to CD-ROM voice acting of the 1990s, I dunno.

Also, the music was fine for 1991. But that was a long time ago. The modern rendition uses strings and period-correct instruments, but the problem is that the chord sequences and melodies sound like Depeche Mode. Because the original composer was a self-taught europop musician rather than a professionally-trained soundtrack composer, because in 1991 publishers weren't willing to spend money hiring James Horner.

A few of the cues work really well, so perhaps I'm being nitpicky. The thing is that the culmination of the Captain's story - which happens right at the beginning - should be sad, but the melody is... well, it's a single-finger Depeche Mode synthpop tune.

But in summary Obra Dinn is well worth the £10 I bought it for, and the £16 it normally retails for. I finished it in ten hours. I'm no good at maths, but according to my calculator that's like watching four films but for the price of one film plus popcorn etc.

There is one thing. Dinn really highlights the tragedy of the text adventure. Of all the genres that existed in the 1980s the text adventure should have dated the least, because writing is writing. Even the best-looking games of the 1980s look and feel ancient today, but writing is still writing. Very, very, very few films from the 1980s haven't dated at all. Down by Law? Paris, Texas? The Elephant Man? But there's nothing specifically 1989 about The Remains of the Day, nothing inherently 1984 about Ironweed etc. I'm not saying that literature doesn't date, but it has fewer opportunities to date, whereas even the most carefully-shot 1980s film has old-fashioned cars in the background.

But because text adventures were written for machines with less than 64kb of usable memory, and because the games had to be take hours to finish, they had terse writing and annoying puzzles, so the writing didn't have space to breathe and the games were no fun to play. By the time the hardware had enough memory for actual proper writing the world had moved on, and so the text adventure died off.

There were attempts to push the genre in the 1990s, and there's still a text adventure scene - they call it interactive fiction these days - and perhaps the text adventure might one day be the future of literature, but it's sad so little from the 1980s and 1990s remains and has any lasting worth. In which case Obra Dinn is a minor miracle, and I'm glad that it exists.

The Moonwalkers

Let's have a look at The Moonwalkers, but there's something that's bugging me. "Shoot the glass". For some reason I kept thinking of that line. I spent the whole day thinking about it. "Shoot the glass". It's from Die Hard. Perhaps because we're coming up to Christmas. Do you remember Thirtysomething? Imagine the cast of Thirtysomething being shot and blown up by suave European criminals. That's why Die Hard is so awesome. One of the reasons. 1987. Nineteen-eighty-seven. Dawn of the modern age.

"Shoot... the glass". I think it's the way Alan Rickman carefully pronounces the word "shoot". And the tone, as if he was scolding a particularly dim child. Which is funny, because the other guy in that scene is blonde man-mountain Alexander Godunov, whose character really does come across as an overgrown boy in the rest of the film.

This is not the place to wonder why Hans delivered the line in English. Suffice it to say that Alan Rickman knocked it out of the park. Who was the baddy in Die Hard 2? Colonel something. And there was another baddie, Major something, who ended up sucked into a plane engine. I can't even remember their names. Stewart? Stuart? Major... no. They were just action men, they didn't have style. They didn't wear John Phillips suits or sport modern goatee beards.

In the series' defence Jeremy Irons was pretty good in Die Hard 3 - the last, to date, of the Die Hard films - but only pretty good. See, Hans Gruber had a kind of operatic passion. He was a drama queen. Rickman's take on the character was very showy, very theatrical, presumably because he was a stage actor, used to broad strokes. But that's why he was great.

I believe that Die Hard would easily work as an opera. The material writes itself. Sadly Alan Rickman himself can never reprise the role, because 2016. What a year that was. Look at these people writing about 2016, on 06 December of that year, safe in the knowledge that death was over for that year.

Solveig Dommartin is in space

But death is never over. It's important not to say "shoot the glass" out loud. Not in the street or on a train. There is a whole universe inside your head, a private universe separated from the outside world by a loading pause. You must never allow one universe to leak accidentally into another.

Never allow that and today we're going to have a look at The Moonwalkers, an audio-visual experience held at a new venue in London called The Lightroom. It reminded me a bit of Volume, the all-around projection screen that allows Netflix et al to churn out good-looking shows on a tiny budget, or that globe thing in Las Vegas, but on a smaller scale.

That globe thing. Which is called The Sphere, that's it. In Paradise, Las Vegas. They were going to build one in London as well, but a bunch of small-minded locals complained that it would ruin their sleep. I have the impression that no-one liked the idea at first, but after The Sphere finally opened (it was delayed by COVID) people started to warm to it, because it was actually pretty sweet. Too sweet for London though.

The Lightroom isn't nearly as striking. In photographs it looks a bit naff:

The space-space

There's no ceiling, and the rest of the venue resembles the back half of a sports hall, all exposed pipes and concrete and twisty corridors. The whole thing has a slightly ad-hoc, prefab air, but perhaps it actually is prefabricated. It's not bad, as such, but my snap impression is that the space needed to be ten feet wider in all directions to be truly jaw-dropping, and it needed to be dimmer, to hide the seams.

It is however a lot more impressive in motion. The Moonwalkers is a fifty-minute dash through NASA's Apollo moon landing programme, narrated by Tom Hanks, international treasure. It's also an advert for NASA's Artemis project, which is essentially Apollo times two. There are interviews with NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Victor Glover, and as they talked about their inspirations I wondered what would happen if either of them were found to have cheated at cards or NASA decided to scale back Artemis or cancel it. I assume the editors of The Moonwalkers would have to bring Tom Hanks back to do some more narration.

The Moonwalkers is also yet another go at remastering and repackaging the enormous wealth of high-def media that NASA generated in the 1960s. I still have fond memories of seeing Michael Light's Full Moon remastering project at the Hayward Gallery back in 1999. Back then NASA only had PhotoShop 5 - not CS5, I mean PhotoShop 5 - so they had to edit out all the fiducial markers by hand, without to aid of AI, but they managed.

I don't want to sound cynical about the periodic rehashing of NASA assets. Full Moon was almost a quarter of a century ago. That's longer than most people on the internet have been alive. It makes perfect sense that someone else would have a go.

Some of the footage also popped up in the Apollo 11 documentary that did the rounds a while back. It was filmed by a chap called Theo Kamecke for his own movie, Moonwalk One, and because he used 65mm Todd-AO cameras the footage is still stunning. Mad respect to whoever dug out those film cans.

The Moonwalkers is a fairly short documentary. It begins with a big chunk of John F Kennedy's "we choose to go the moon" speech, emphasising the great speed with which humanity progressed from hitting each other with repurposed bones to inventing the jet engine, then progressing more or less directly to Apollo 11. With a short hop and skip we see Neil, Buzz, and Mike board their Saturn V, and then they're off. The earlier Apollo missions aren't featured at all beyond the classic staging separation footage from one of the uncrewed flights. There's no Apollo 8 going around the moon, or Apollo 10 doing its dress rehearsal, or the one where Wally Schirra got really annoyed with ground control and told them to knock it off.

Then we learn a bit about Artemis, and then there's a surprisingly lengthy section on the moon buggy, and then we come home. It ends abruptly with a capsule plopping into the sea. There's no final flourish, it just ends.

Is it any good? Mostly yes, although it works better as a long music video with narration rather than a documentary. Like For All Mankind, but more concise. The script has a lot of the typical "we gaze with wonder at the moon because curiosity is a human imperative" stuff without feeling completely glurgy, and Tom Hanks is of course good value. The soundtrack, written by Anne Nitikin and performed by the Royal Philharmonic, lifts it up a notch. In a neat touch the moon buggy sequence segues into a pastiche of Pink Floyd, or at least that's what it seemed like.

One sequence that stood out was a simple orbit around the Earth while space hippie Rusty Schweickart talked about something that I completely ignored because I was engrossed in the music. Another thing that grabbed me was an attempt to give the moon some scale with deft CGI. The moon has no air, so photographs look oddly flat. The craters we see look like bumps, when in fact they're as deep as a skyscraper; the rolling terrain looks like nearby hills, when in fact they are distant mountains.

For the most part the lightroom aspect is fairly conservative. The action generally takes place on the main screen, dead ahead; occasionally the show mixes things up and projects the main event onto the left screen. Curiously never the right. The right wall, rear, and occasionally floor are used in the manner of a fighter jet's multi-function displays, e.g. the extra information is interesting but not essential. As mentioned the ceiling is just a big hole, which feels like a missed opportunity, especially for something that takes place in space.

It reminded me a lot of those multi-screen experiments from the 1960s, such as A Place to Stand, or indeed the rest of the 1967 Canadian Expo. The Moonwalkers is actually less advanced than e.g. "Canada 67". It gave me a renewed respect for the poor sods who had to edit and composite together all those film clips without computer assistance.

Now, as a spectacle The Moonwalkers works, but I learned more or less nothing about Apollo, and it's a shame there wasn't a conventional this-is-how-they-did-it aspect. It's also very impersonal. The only people we learn anything about are the Artemis astronauts and Tom Hanks. There's a roll-call of fallen astronauts, but they are ghosts.

"The Earth was without form"? No. "Houston, we've had a problem"? No. Apollo 13 is covered as part of a list of Apollo missions, with a caption merely noting that the landing was aborted. Given that Tom Hanks actually participated in the Apollo 13 mission this may have been done to avoid a temporal singularity. I don't want to sound as if I'm lambasting the thing, but it could easily have been longer.

Hovering over it is the issue of cost. Tickets start at £25, but the pricing is dynamic and actually seems to hover around £27-30. That's two good films in a regular cinema or a trip on the Millennium Wheel or a single piece of medium cod. It's more than it costs to see a film at the BFI IMAX, for example. If the lightroom itself had been a mind-blowing, once-in-a-lifetime experience £25 wouldn't be so bad, but the venue is smaller and less impressive in the flesh than it appears in the publicity materials. For £12.50 I would rave about it, for a quarter of a hundred pounds not so much. There's a bar upstairs, and a shop downstairs with books etc, although it's too small to work very well (the guests queue up for the auditorium in the shop, so there's no space to actually stand there and do any shopping).

For the record The Moonwalkers is on at The Lightroom, London, until 21 April 2024. I have no idea what will happen after that. The film would probably work just as well as a flat projection on an IMAX screen, in which case it would still be worth it for the soundtrack, which is not, as far as I can tell, available separately.

Wings of Desire: Alien Observer

Off to the cinema to see Wings of Desire, a classic film from 1987, directed by Wim Wenders, starring Berlin and people.

For the record I saw it at the BFI Southbank, because if you're going to see a film you might as well see the hell out of it. As per the instructions above I went directly to the screen. I did not go to the Box Office counter. No sir.

It was a digital projection of a 2017 restoration. I can confirm that it looked better than the screenshots in this article, which were taken from an old DVD. Wings of Desire is a fantastic advertisement for black and white film, and also colour film, but mostly black and white film.

I'm not sure why the BFI showed it. They're in the middle of a Powell + Pressburger season, and I couldn't see any posters for Wings of Desire. Perhaps the film reminded them of A Matter of Life and Death and they thought "why not" and "yes" and "why not".

I can confirm that the cinema was packed. For a short period in the 1980s Wim Wenders knew how to get bums on seats. After the one-two punch of Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire his filmography became incredibly erratic, but for a while he was up there with Jim Jarmusch and Krzysztof Kieślowski etc. He was hip. He had Bono's phone number! Probably.

Wings of Desire can be boiled down to two images. Solveig Dommartin with tattered angel wings swinging on a trapeze, and Bruno Ganz, also with angel wings, gazing down at Berlin. One can fly; one longs to fly. Those two images have consistently drawn people to Wings of Desire. Who is that woman, and who is that man? Do they meet? What kind of world do they inhabit? That's why people go to see Wings of Desire.

A car, one of many

Some people have a movie face

Wings of Desire is a good film, verging on great, but it's frustrating. It reminds me a lot of Chungking Express. It's hard to dislike either film and no-one ever made friends by shitting on them, but they have problems.

They were both shot on location in charismatic cities that still exist but aren't quite the same. They are both excellent advertisements for good old-fashioned 35mm motion picture film. They are a mixture of mood piece and romance, and ultimately they feel unsatisfying because the moody elements work well, but the filmmakers weren't interested in the ordinary stuff. Chungking Express would have been far more effective if the crime drama had been fleshed out and the romance had been plausible, and the same problem affects Desire, minus crime plus plus romance.

The first two-thirds of Wings are slow, sad, mesmerising, fascinating. The film stars Bruno Ganz as an angel who gazes down at Berlin from the sky above. He can hear people's innermost thoughts but he can't interfere with worldly matters. Along with his angel friends he documents life on earth in a little notebook, making nowhere plans for nobody, and by gosh he is bored. He wishes he could taste coffee or plant a tree or something. He's good at being an angel. Kids love him. His wardrobe and ponytail were on point circa 1987. But he's bored. He's so bored!

Ganz and his fellow angels stride along with an air of imperious detachment, as if they were David Bowie living in Berlin in the late 1970s. They're distant, non-judgemental, not entirely cold, but their life doesn't seem much fun. One scene ends with the angels gathered in Berlin's central library after closing time, left with no-one to observe, nowhere to go, nothing to do, the last people at the party. It's not an enviable life, being an angel.

The colour sequences represent our view of the world; the angels see in crisp clear monochrome

Wings of Desire is simultaneously timeless and a little bit old-fashioned. Not just because it was shot in the 1980s and has a lot of old Porsches in the background, but also the general style.

I also have the impression that Wenders was culturally a few years out of date. By the time Wings of Desire came out Berlin was bopping to the hip new sounds of acid house and techno, but the film culminates with a performance by Nick Cave, playing a song from 1984, and in general the musings about the destruction of Berlin and its division by conflict feel like something from an earlier era of filmmaking. I thought the Germans had got over that by the 1980s.

The style of the film, with its lengthy internal monologues, slow camera moves, showy composition, its themes of love and peace and war, belong to an earlier age of high art film-making, a modernist age, rather than the postmodern 1980s. Almost at times a pre-modern age. Very occasionally my mind wandered to Alexander Korda's Things to Come and Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator, perhaps because of the occasionally stagey sets, perhaps because of the sincerity. I'm not sure why.

I mention the art film element because Wings could so easily have been camp. There's a certain kind of stereotypical old-fashioned European art film that hasn't aged very well. I'm thinking specifically of Alphaville but there are many others. Wings has all the ingredients, albeit that there isn't a hint a class struggle or Marxism or Maoism or indeed politics at all, which is one of the reasons why it feels timeless. The dialogue is heavy with internal monologues that consist of lists and abstract questions answered with more questions. The soundtrack is mournful cello music. It's a film in which people make a film. One of the characters is a writer who believes that visionaries - such as film-makers, for example - can heal the world. It ends with a dedication to other filmmakers.

But it's much better than that. As a mood piece it's fantastic. Wings is affecting without being sentimental, but at the same time it has an emotional core. Curt Bois gives a good performance as an elderly writer who has a crisis of faith while trying to find Potsdamer Platz. On the surface his storyline should be pretentious, but his performance won me over. I felt sorry for that old man and wanted to tell him that things didn't turn out so bad, at least for a while. What's so funny about peace, love, and understanding?

We also hear from an unnamed taxi driver who muses that we are all citadels, each with a different password, and that if a politician could guess our trigger phrase he, she, they would own us. "No-one is currently in a position to do this", he thinks, but what about mass-media and AI? Politicians are always trying to guess our passwords. To get inside our defences, to say the magic words. What if they learn to guess our passwords faster than we can change them. What then.

Mid-way through the film we are introduced to Peter Falk, playing Peter Falk, der Filmstar, who is shooting some kind of Second World War drama in Berlin. I have the impression that most of his sequences were improvised, including a scene where he tries on different hats. Wings has a coldness to it, but the film warms up when Falk appears. Was there ever an episode of Columbo set in Berlin? That would have been fascinating. NB after writing this post I stumbled on this fascinating issue of POV, a Danish film journal, and apparently yes, Falk's role was largely improvised. Because he was good at it and Wenders wasn't a dummy.

Most plot summaries of Wings talk about the love story, but in reality it has three parallel storylines - the elderly writer, the love story, and Peter Falk, who is one of the few people who appears to be aware of the angels. He can't see them - he isn't an angel himself - but he can sense their presence, which becomes apparent in a striking scene where he suddenly and unexpectedly addresses Ganz' character, who by rights should be invisible. After an hour of Ganz hovering un-noticed it comes as a jolt.

Falk's storyline ends with a bittersweet sequence in which he urges Ganz' character to explore the world, before ducking back into the darkness of a film set. "You need to figure that out for yourself - that's the fun of it." It should be sad, because we never see Falk again, but there's a sense that it's going to be alright. If the film had ended at that point I wouldn't have minded.

Solveig Dommartin's movie face

I felt sad when Falk left the film. I was reminded that he's gone forever. Wings has a melancholic undercurrent, because all of the main cast are gone. Curt Bois died in 1991. Falk in 2011. Solveig Dommartin at a strikingly young age in 2007. Bruno Ganz passed away in 2019, six years after Otto Sander, who played his angel companion Cassiel.

As mentioned in the text, none of the main cast are with us any more

Alas the film falls apart when it comes to the romance aspect, which dominates the last act. The romance feels forced, as if Wenders felt that Ganz' character needed greater motivation to give up his angelic life than just ennui, so he settled on a love story, but didn't have his heart in it.

One problem is that the plot thread begins with Ganz spying on Dommartin's character as she changes out of her circus gear, which is shot as if it was a horror film. A more fundamental problem is that the two characters appear to have nothing in common, and Dommartin seems far happier with her circus colleagues than Ganz.

The two actors are individually great, but they have no romantic chemistry, and the film doesn't take time to give them any reason to be together, beyond "it was fated".

I remember seeing Lawrence of Arabia at the same venue just before COVID, and the chemistry between Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif was immense. I wanted them to kiss. In contrast the love story in Desire left me cold. It ends with a lengthy monologue from Dommartin that goes nowhere and doesn't say a great deal.

"But it's not a romance film, it's a high art meditation on the human condition", which is true, but why couldn't the romance have been engaging too? Under the Skin worked as both a creepy horror film and a... whatever it was, ditto Mulholland Drive. The recently-canonised Jeanne Dielman wasn't just an excellent guide to preparing veal cutlets, it was a solid art film as well. In contrast Wings' total lack of interest in unsubtle gushy emotions rather than subtle moods lets it down.

But enough of the bad stuff. Out with the bad air, in with the good. Wings is fundamentally episodic, so although the love story doesn't work, it's forgivable. If anything the film is actually the tale of an elderly author who has a crisis of faith, with a love story in the background as a kind of added bonus, and I wonder if Wenders added the romance as a way of getting more funding. It's also a film in which Peter Falk gives us life tips, and that's good as well because Peter Falk was the bomb.

It's also a chance to explore a Berlin that no longer exists, which is bittersweet, because it's easy to forget that the hip edgy Berlin of yore was split in half by a death zone. But to have been there! At a safe distance, and only visiting.

So I experienced three emotions, which are priceless, and with that I will leave Wings of Desire alone. It's big enough to look after itself.

EDIT: For the record I visited Berlin back in 2016. Whenever I read through my old blog posts I think to myself "was that man high on crack" and that post is no exception. But some of the pictures were nice. This is what Berlin looked like in 2016 through the eye of an Olympus Stylus, with a mixture of different types of film that I bought in Berlin, because Berlin has some hip camera shops, or did in 2016.

Tempelhof, which was still a functioning airport in 1987.

At the time I was trying to check out locations that David Bowie might have visited when he lived in Berlin; a location tour of Wings of Desire would be awkward today because so much of the city has changed, but other people have had a go.