The Zero Theorem (Terry Gilliam)
Essentially operating under the guise of a lesser Brazil, Gilliam's latest takes on the paradox of isolation in a world connected by fibre optics, the atomisation of society, the transcendence of faceless corporations from the geographic to the facets of our personal lives. This is combined with classic Gilliam themes: an oddball protagonist, a dreamer of dark things, subservient to a purposely generic higher power, and longing for escape; the question of whether what is real is what's out there or what's inside oneself; omnipresent Big Brother style surveillance. Indeed, much has been made of the script's apparent fecklessness in rehashing old stuff, and yet none of it really feels old, is that because it's timeless or rather because this film is genuinely new? Am I just happy that one of my favourite directors is still somehow able to obtain funding for projects probably no one else would touch? It's true, no one makes films like Gilliam, no one has the same perspective as Gilliam, and while he may not always make masterpieces he always offers something that no one else could provide. Well, here, I say, he has not remade but rethought the concepts of Brazil for another time and place, not an imagined future but the present, its digital clockwork externalised and pervasive, a vortex of information controlled by unseen hands. In The Zero Theorem Gilliam reaches for the heights of his greatest work, and almost makes it.