Joe Keaton

I am of two minds when it comes to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s sole trek into “sci-fi.”  Throughout, his touch–stylized but never over the top–is assured.  He shot the film, originally a TV movie, in 16 mm, which gives it an appropriately grainy, lurid texture; and Michael Ballhaus’s cinematography stuns.  It’s rich with blue hues, and it makes the most of the modernist German architecture couched in practically every frame.  I get that the story, a semi-sluggish trip into a “world on a wire” (a fragile, bent state of mind that may be the real world in which the hero seeks a real “reality”), is supposed to be disorienting.  That’s part of the fun.  But I wish the film had more zip.  Less mannered and flashy than A Clockwork Orange, (perhaps the only other great look at a future-is-now dystopia from around the early ’70s), it lulls you along without making you notice you’re in the hands of a great filmmaker who’s as taken with the world of artifice as he is with the concept behind it.