Hated imaginarium, Twelve Monkeys is one of my top 3 all time favorites. Hard to say where this one lands.
Tiny, tiny budget so I’m a bit concerned he didn’t have the money to fully realize the environment.
I saw this in the Sitges movie festival last year. Fairly nonsensical, and very low budget. I’m not a Gilliam fan, but this was very deliberately incomprehensible.
And then years later again you found out it was actually George Harrison!
You guys are crazy. All the movies you’ve mentioned are great (well, ok, Parnassus was maybe just good; Munchausen was great except for Robin Williams). If you want a not-great Gilliam movie, why has no one mentioned Tideland? The movie where he felt he had to put a personal disclaimer at the beginning (something along the lines of “a lot of you will hate this”). Brothers Grimm was a very different sort of movie for him, but I enjoyed it for what it was. Oh, and if you don’t like the Fisher King (especially if you didn’t like it because of Williams again) just watch the parts with Tom Waits. Heck, just watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpEBOavYqHQ
So I finally saw this movie. What a chaotic mess. I thought the ending was pretty good, actually, but the bulk of the movie was incoherent and poorly conceived, not to mention naive and sophomoric at times. The meaning of the “theorem” itself should never have been mentioned because it was so banal; though perhaps at one point in planning the banality might have seemed ironic, in the end it was just dumb. The plot structure, such as it was, was so evident it was like the skeleton of a whale showing through the rotting flesh of the movie: everything in the movie was so deliberately and obviously manipulated by the director that it was hard to care about any of it. In some movies, the borrowings seem like honest homages or easter-eggs, but in this one they almost seemed like ripoffs, even of Brazil, as it seemed like Gilliam was ripping himself off, somehow. Individual actors didn’t do a bad job with their various over-the-top role and I’m sure Matt Damon had fun.
I very much felt like it was a poorly done sister to Brazil. Much of it felt forced. In the end the meaning was lost, or didn’t even matter. I agree it seemed like a rip off.
Watching Zero Theorem, I got the sense that the system had finally broken Terry Gilliam. :(
-Tom
Yeah, very sad.
It was no Brazil or 12 Monkeys, certainly, but I thought it was very enjoyable and very Gilliam. Lots of neat future-world design touches and a largely excellent cast. The story was kind of muddled, I will grant you, but that’s not necessarily what I watch Gilliam for.