The time Hollywood ruined Wim Wenders’ Berlin masterpiece

When it comes to movies, there is a lot of talk about things being better in the past. As The Fast & Furious franchise prepares to release its ninth instalment of reckless driving movies, and Disney ploughs through its half-hearted live action remakes, including Cinderella, The Lion King, and The Little Mermaid, it can be easy to believe originality in cinema ended a long time ago. But Hollywood has always been trying to squeeze water from any successful pebble. Case-in-point: The 1998 English-language remake of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987), City of Angels—it is spectacularly bad.

Wings of Desire, or Himmel über Berlin (“Heaven Over Berlin” in English) is about a guardian angel in Cold War-era Berlin, one who falls in love with a trapeze artist and gives up his immortality to be with her. While City of Angels follows a similar storyline, all of the charming details of the German version are left by the wayside in favour of traditional Hollywood tropes, starting with the setting. In the original, one of the main functions of having the Angles be able to hear people’s thoughts—without being seen by them—is to showcase how people deal with everyday life in a city divided by a wall with two very different governments. The American version offers very little insight into the sociology of Los Angeles in the 1980s, instead, satisfying itself with locating the story in a city that has “angels” in the name.

The leading angels, Cassiel and Damien, refer to specific archangels in the Abrahamic religions. Cassiel is the angel who presides over the death of kings, while Damien is another name for the most famous fallen angel, Lucifer. In the Hollywood version, the reference to the dark archangel is abandoned in favour of the name “Seth,” because a Nicholas Cage was starring in the movie—and he did not look like a Damien. Cassiel gets to keep his name, but it sounds very different when pronounced in Cage’s southern Californian accent. Marion, the melancholy French trapeze artist, is changed to Dr. Maggie Rice and played by Meg Ryan, who was defined by the words “cute” and “bubbly” in the 90s. Instead of being a circus performer who wears a pair of feathered wings and flies through the air, she is a surgeon who holds people’s hearts in her hand and is too dedicated to her job to find love.

Wings of Desire has a love story that takes place within a larger narrative, but City of Angels is billed as pure romance, or as the voiceover in the trailer describes it, “She would give anything on earth, he would give up eternity, for love.” One of the major problems with putting the love story centre stage in the adaptation is that Ryan and Cage have no chemistry. Although Ryan obviously has major romantic comedy credentials, when paired with Cage’s signature wild-eyed stares, there is a disconnect that makes you wonder if they shot the scenes separately and were green-screened together. After finding out that Seth is not a human by accidentally chopping off his (very fake looking) finger and seeing no blood, Maggie gets angry at the angel and slaps him across the face for lying about being able to feel physical things. Cage’s character then tries to diffuse the situation by telling her that the has feelings for her, to which she replies, “I don’t believe you, do you feel that?”—despite being an award winning actor, Cage has no one convinced.

One of the reasons Wim Wenders won Best Direction for his version at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival is because of the cinematography and satisfyingly slow pacing of the film. In the American adaptation, the camera instead luxuriates on odd shots of Cage, like when takes his first shower after becoming human or as he swims in the ocean in ecstasy in the final scene. Other artistic elements, like the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke or concert scenes of then-local West Berlin band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, have no equivalent in the LA version, but the soundtrack includes some peak Nineties tunes by Alanis Morissette and Sarah McLachlan (“In the Arms of an Angel”).

Finally, when comparing the two movies, you have to talk about the ending (spoiler alert). While Wings of Desire satisfies its drama elsewhere, City of Angels has Maggie die in Seth’s arms, after a bike accident, hitting you over the head with the takeaways that life has an ephemeral beauty to it and that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. This is encapsulated by a dramatic funeral in the rain and an exchange between Seth and Cassiel, where the fallen angel doubts God, but regains his faith after being reminded of how wonderful the experience was.

Don’t get me wrong, City of Angels falls into the so-bad-it’s-funny film genera, but it definitely does a huge disservice to its award-winning inspiration.