Claire Tourneur, who has been traveling around Europe trying unsuccessfully to distract herself after discovering that her boyfriend Eugene slept with her best friend, is unconcerned by the impending nuclear disaster though her sleep has been troubled by a recurring nightmare.
When she gets stuck in a traffic jam in Southern France after it is projected as a possible impact site, she takes a side road and encounters a pair of friendly bank robbers who enlist her to carry their stolen cash to Paris in exchange for a cut of the loot.
En route to Paris Claire meets Trevor McPhee and agrees to let him travel with her to the city to escape an armed man named Burt who is following him.
The detective reveals that Trevor has a bounty on his head for stealing opal from a mining syndicate in Australia, and has just boarded a flight to Lisbon.
When Sam buys a ticket to Beijing on the Trans-Siberian Railway, the computer alerts Claire and she leaves Eugene while she thinks he is sleeping.
She buys them train tickets to a random mountain inn, where the kindly innkeepers provide herbs that heal Sam's eyes.
Sam reveals to Claire that the prototype camera he stole was invented by his father, Henry, and is a device that, by recording brain impulses of the photographer for later transfer, takes pictures blind people can see.
While Claire and Sam are in the air, the satellite is shot down by the U.S. government, and the resulting nuclear electromagnetic pulse interferes with the functioning of unshielded electronics and wipes their memory units.
He and Claire walk across the desert until they are found by Sam's friend David, who has Eugene, Winter, and Chico in the bed of his hand-cranked diesel-powered truck.
Sam, who has a strained relationship with his father, attempts to do this immediately after arriving,[b] but he fails because he is too tired, which leads to an argument with Henry.
On New Year's Eve, the same evening the group have intercepted a mundane radio broadcast that indicates human civilization has not ended, she "just let[s] go" and dies quietly.
Eugene finds a catatonic Claire and takes her away from the lab, driving her into painful withdrawal when he refuses to replace the batteries for her screen.
[3] Wenders, who had a long-standing fascination with the Australian Outback, shot a substantial amount of the film in and around Alice Springs, Northern Territory, Australia.
Wenders and technicians at NHK (the only facility which could play back HD video at the time) worked for six weeks on these sequences, intentionally distorting the imagery to create strange visual effects.
The restoration, which was supervised by the director and his wife Donata, was undertaken by ARRI Film & TV Services Berlin, with the support of the CNC.
This version was screened for the first time in the U.S. at several art house theaters in the fall of 2015 as part of a retrospective tour of Wenders' filmography by Janus Films.
In September 2019, The Criterion Collection announced a special-edition Blu-ray and DVD of the 4K restoration of the 287-minute director's cut of the film, which was released on 10 December 2019.