A computer hacker whose goal is to discover the reason for human existence continually finds his work interrupted thanks to the Management; namely, they send a teenager and lusty love interest to distract him.
The Zero Theorem falls short of its promise: events don't raise the pulse or excite the mind and even the marvellous Waltz seems a little adrift. Perhaps most frustrating is that this is a story which takes in love and loneliness but fails to touch the heart.
It’s a visual marvel: a low-fi, old school dystopia that nevertheless feels both contemporary and worryingly prescient.
It’s the tangle of workings-out not the easy answer that are the proof of a theorem, and that magnificent, sparkling, insightful chaos abounds here.
Theorem is not exactly like Brazil – its dystopian vision is candy-coloured rather than dark, Qohen dreams of having hair rather than wings, and the overarching threat in the film is corporate rather than political. Nor is it as inventive, sharply satirical, accomplished or deeply felt.
Dazzles intermittently, irks occasionally.
The future as candy-coloured paranoid nightmare: not quite Gilliam’s best, but still the most satisfying movie he’s made for years.
It is frantically overworked, over-designed and overdetermined in its hyper-crazy world where nothing seems really to be at stake.
The film is a strange mixture of the flippant and the profound.
An uneven film sparking with Gilliam's manic inventiveness and enduring fondness for the things that make us human.
Too weird for words.
I'd rather see a director failing on their own terms than succeeding on someone else's, and while this doesn't quite find Gilliam flying, he is at least falling with style.
The Meaning of Life: Terry Gilliam on The Zero Theorem
Terry Gilliam
General release. Check local listings for show times.
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