Reseñas de la crítica

In the same way Werner Herzog wouldn't use CGI to "drag" a steamship over a mountain, Gilliam shouldn't allow himself to be seduced by technology that allows him to splay the contents of his brain semi-directly onto film. But that's been the case with recent Gilliam efforts. From 2005's The Brothers Grimm onward, his filmmaking has lost much of its tactile, junk-shop appeal... Gilliam has produced an interesting but deeply flawed film, one with ideas but little risk.

The culture's caught up to Gilliam. Everybody's doing Orwell now. But Gilliam's appropriation feels both aptly skeptical and unfashionably utopian. Forget the smartphone. He'd rather swipe at the sun.

The Zero Theorem may make little sense, but we once looked to Gilliam less for rigorously structured, internally coherent storytelling than for eye-popping imagery that played particularly well on the big screen. His new film is certainly underwhelming in my living room, but it's hard to imagine The Zero Theorem would be much to look at in a theater either, so uninspired are its futuristic images, the likes of which we've grown well accustomed to since the days of Blade Runner.

The movie's allegory-steeped plot... is a case of "close, but no cigar." And no matter how feverishly Gilliam directs and no matter how enthusiastically his actors act, the whole thing remains too, er, theoretical—as if its main purpose is to demonstrate or disprove certain propositions rather than invest us in the hero's quest for happiness and enlightenment. Knowing Gilliam's humanism, this seems unlikely, but that's what comes through.

The greater [Gilliam's] budgetary and narrative limitations, the more his imagination wants to cram in there, and sometimes his films threaten to break under the weight of all those fevered obsessions. The Zero Theorem, however, doesn't break. It starts off as a mess, yes, but eventually finds itself in a very poignant place. Even a lesser Terry Gilliam film is usually more engaging and invigorating than most of the other movies out there.

While the screenplay, written by first-timer Pat Rushin, wasn't expressly intended for Gilliam, the director has interpreted it in a way that makes the result play like poorly reheated leftovers from his earlier work. It's the kind of movie that inspires comments like "great art direction!"—praise that's really a veiled insult.

This cartoonish sci-fi satire might be described as Terry Gilliam's Mr. Arkadin—a visually inspired but frequently confounding reworking of longtime personal themes... The overstuffed production design and antibureaucratic humor echo Gilliam's Brazil, whereas the air of apocalyptic dread recalls 12 Monkeys and the misbegotten Tideland. Gilliam has never seemed so unconcerned with narrative, and the story devolves into chaos early on; the film feels liberated but also rudderless.

The Zero Theorem is very much a Terry Gilliam film: fantastical, kooky, occasionally sloppy, but with a big brain and a beating heart. And like most of his work, it won't appeal to all, but its unmistakable passion makes it well worth the while.

The good news is that director Terry Gilliam sees this material for the derivative pandering nonsense that it is, and deemphasizes it accordingly. The bad news is that Gilliam's contemptuous flippancy leaves you with another of his pointless and indulgent fashion parades, in which he wears his sense of invention with an air of self-congratulatory entitlement that sucks all the life right out of the room.

There's no mistaking his latest effort's similarities to Brazil: both take place in an information-overloaded/deadened future in which an alienated hero increasingly confuses fantasy and reality in the search for emancipation. But Brazil possessed a unique sensibility and attitude; Theorem, in contrast, feels empty, underdeveloped, and unintentionally self-parodic.

[Tilda Swinton rapping is] merely a tone-deaf gag that perhaps has marginally more YouTube life in it than the surfeit of other tone-deaf gags in "The Zero Theorem"... A dystopian quest narrative that offers ample density without complexity, its superficial structural and symbolic parallels to "Brazil" -- still, at 28 years of age, the director's most broadly admired film -- suggest even Gilliam has clocked, and tired of, his creative decline.

Anyone who's seen Gilliam's (superior) Brazil will know exactly how things go down, and its broad satire of faceless, imperious bureaucracy is comfort-zone filmmaking at its purest... Yet this is probably the director's most cogent and crisp work in some time, its simple narrative drive towards discovering the true nature of the Zero Theorem helping to ally some of the structural rot of his more indulgent, freeform and episodic features of the past.