Brazil

One of my all time favourite sci fi movies. Set the bench mark for modern sci fi, should be considered a great like Blade Runner. Great acting, story, soundtrack! 5/5

A film that was enough for more than one review: dream, nightmare, utopia and reality.

It was in 1939 that composer and singer-songwriter Ary Barroso released the iconic song “Aquarela do Brasil”. This samba became an icon of Brazilian music and was sung and disseminated by such noble voices as Francisco Alves, João Gilberto, Tom Jobim, Caetano Veloso, Tim Maia, Gal Costa, Erasmo Carlos, Elis Regina and, in English versions, Frank Sinatra and the Portuguese Carmem Miranda. Ary Barroso, however, never imagined that the mere sight of an elderly man, sitting on a beach on a rainy day while listening to his song, would end up inspiring Terry Gilliam to make a film. But, before these words can mislead anyone, and especially any Brazilian, it is necessary to clarify that the film has nothing to do with Brazil.

The film takes place in an unnamed country that lives under a dictatorship (okay, Brazil was a dictatorship when the film was released, but the similarity ends there). The government, obsessed with controlling information, has created a monstrous and highly ineffective bureaucratic system that makes fatal mistakes. It is because of one of these mistakes that a citizen is arrested and killed as a revolutionary, mistaken for the real fugitive. And so we meet Sam Lowry, a government official with a conventional life who is plagued by dreams where he flies like a bird and saves a damsel in distress. His life changes precisely when he meets a woman like the one in the dream and finds that she, too, is in danger of being arrested for another mistake.

I haven't seen both movies, but I believe the critics who said there were similarities between this movie and "1984". I myself could see the similarities with “Metropolis”, either in the narrative or in the bizarre and exaggerated visual aspects. As in those films, we have a dystopian, totalitarian society, where the individual is stripped of his humanity and becomes a cog in a larger gear, serving the State. Of...

Score: 20/10 A Perfect, Unassailable Masterpiece of Dystopian Imagination

Some films are not merely watched; they are inhabited. Terry Gilliam's Brazil is such a film. It is a towering, terrifying, hilarious, and heartbreaking vision of a world that feels more prescient with each passing year. The Director's Cut the only version that should ever be watched is a flawless work of art, an achievement so complete that it transcends traditional scoring systems. Hence, the only appropriate score is 20/10.

The Imagination of Terry Gilliam is Other Worldly

There is no filmmaker quite like Gilliam, and Brazil is his magnum opus. The film's bureaucracy-as-nightmare aesthetic is so densely, lovingly, and horrifyingly detailed that you could pause any frame and spend an hour tracing the labyrinthine ducts, the archaic pneumatic tubes, the sprawling, brutalist architecture that seems to breed despair. Any reality that Terry Gilliam constructs is perfect in every detail, from the claustrophobic, duct-riddled apartment of Sam Lowry to the sterile, soul-crushing expanse of the Ministry of Information. This is not merely production design; it is world-building at the level of high art.

The Director's Cut: The Only Version

The Director's Cut is not an extended edition; it is the correct edition. Gilliam's legendary battle with Universal Studios over the film's ending is the stuff of Hollywood lore. The studio demanded a "happy" ending a sanitised, cowardly betrayal of everything the film stood for. Gilliam fought, and the Director's Cut is his victory.

Its ending is perfect.

There is no other word for it. The final twenty minutes of Brazil are a devastating, transcendent, and darkly beautiful culmination of everything that came before. Sam Lowry's descent into the labyrinth, his rescue of Jill Layton, their escape into the sunlight... and then the slow, crushing pull back to reality. The revelation that the dream was just that a...