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Such a frustrating disappointment

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Unseen by the human population, other than those who were once like them, angels wander around bleak Berlin, wondering what its like to be human - to see, to feel, to taste, etc... One falls in love with a beautiful trapeze artist and decides he must become human so as to be with her. How he does this we aren't told, but he does. Once he meets her, he doesn't even need to say a word, she immediately loves him, apparently because he visited her dreams, or some mystical connection. It is an ode to the human experience, with a wonderful transition from observance to experience. The ever flowing camera movement mimics the flight-like nature of angels, and gives the film a dreamy, poetic feel. However all the existentialism becomes quite monotonous, and one can't help but feel it should have been told in half the time. Without a plot it feels aimless, and although the themes are slowly revealed, it is far slower than necessary. It does sink us into the mundane, un-feeling nature of the angels, but it doesn't make for compelling viewing!I can't help but feel there are some cryptic messages behind all this, but like the angels, they are seen only by some, and I shall continue my human existence, invigorating the senses, and wondering what it's all about.

For years I've resisted watching Wings of Desire again, afraid that it would spoil the memory and be a disappointment. But watching it now, almost 30 years later, it still feels like one of the most beautiful and haunting movies ever made.It was a stroke of genius to cast Bruno Ganz as an angel, with his aging boxer's face. The angel smiles at a child, and we can't help smiling with him.There are many unforgettable scenes in there. The two angels sharing reports on ordinary people doing ordinary things. The suicide who jumps off a building, while the angel cries "nein!". The lonely trapeze artist proclaiming her love for life. Pretty much every scene is magic. Even the silly ones.I don't believe in angels, but I do believe in this film. It's about kindness and love and the chaotic minds of people. It once made me realize that German is a language of poets, not of goose-stepping thugs.

This is the project great makers undertake without exception from Welles to Iwai; if those things which you can't touch with the hand can be felt to exist, yearning, memory, thought, if right now you can recall an image, it means this space extends around us and is a part of us, so how can this be surrounded with the camera, acknowledged beneath the story and allowed to float as life?It's a great joy to have this, Wenders repeatedly tried. He knows Buddhism, how narratives of the mind obscure a true perception, how dust settles on mirrors. He may or not know that both Buddhists and contemporaneous Greeks early on identified liberating wisdom as the right use of appearances, the link is Alexander's travel to India. And he must know that since the Greeks divinity in the West, apprehension of god, has been implicitly woven with the mind that attempts to transcend itself.So Wenders here is at his most ambitious about this, liberation in life, about death and (literal) god we can only have imaginations anyway. One of these imaginations is used here, the notion of angels in the heavens, but this is only the tool though for floating observation of life unhindered by story, to swim into narratives of mind, then see if we can push beyond and transcend.So an angelic eye swoops down into murky life, the place is Berlin as it contemplates wounds and walls. What do we see there?Our eye floats from one life to the next, one person to another, on one level the film offers a contemporary tapestry of German anxieties. On another the device lets us see more clearly into the nature of these anxieties - as we approach characters we're flooded by that extended self lost in thought, nothing but disappointment, vexation, desire. Parents fret about their son's loud music in the next room, a young acrobat worries that her circus dream may have amounted to nothing.Internal narration. This is typical Wenders, that side of him that keeps me at bay - Chris Marker in Sans Soleil playfully unfolds ribbons of remembrance, Tarkovsky rich clouds of appearance as they calmly empty out, Wenders can be as evocative as both but chooses to plod in rumination. The monologues grate as in previous films, they're too long. But he also reaches out for more.The higher ('angelic') view that brushes with earthly despair but flies off again finds no purpose or solace and only cyclical suffering - what the Buddhists call samsara. All considered, Wenders offers a powerful rendition of mind. Mind as the view that fleets from one thought, one story, to the next. Suffering as rumination and as inability to escape narration.Good, so far. Wenders being German can only feel the burden of history pressing on him, silly zeit and sein. But then finally we have the return to things as one of the angels decides to enter time and mortality. So how does Wenders enter this shift?If we could somehow only know this ethereal life of pure spirit in eternal peace that we've always yearned for, a disembodied mind that hovers above things without ever getting tangled up with them (all our notions of an afterlife converge on this), what would we think? Touch would be a profound mystery, having a body that feels wind or heat. I can't stress enough the importance of limits, it's what energizes life, that I don't know all, that I can be surprised and curious, that I can travel from here to there and discover, that it's all in flux and changing, it's why this whole circus matters.So I can see him stressing all the important realizations. Touch, being free to tangle with things and love. Spontaneous appreciation.I find myself rooting for this German as he shucks off the worry about meaning to be able to find it in the tremendous richness of things as they come to be and vanish again, what Herzog for thirty years had to travel to the most absurd corners to witness and pilgrimage, wash logic with doing. What Tarkovsky meditated inwards in memory, Marker in bemused preoccupation with revolution (never attached like Godard), cats and Tokyo.But Wenders meets his own limits once more. Whereas all these guys could transcend, Wenders only limps. A bit of wandering but without real wonder. In place of any of the small possible encounters he could create around Berlin, he gives us a Nick Cave concert again - style. The camera tracks forth and back in a crowd - style. The two lovers finally find each other - but swap monologues again of stale profundity.More dust. Now the Buddhist achievement of The Passenger becomes apparent.

I did not really like this movie. Maybe it's just not my kind of movie. I found it really slow. The first part was interesting but about halfway through it got kind of boring. The cinematography is really beautiful though. The movie taking place before the Berlin wall fell is a very interesting part looking back on it now.The listening to people's thoughts was great at first but it went on too long. The love story really did hold my interest.I think had it been shortened a bit it would have been much better. I did watch the whole thing as I don't think it's fair to review a movie without sitting through the whole thing but towards the end my mind was really wandering.