Absolutely Fantastic

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Blistering performances.

This movie was all about spectacular visuals. It truly is a feast for the eyes and imagination. As a software engineer I love to see how my profession is portrayed on the big screen. This interpretation is a hoot, and not completely off in a "solving puzzles is fun" kind of way, which is what draws my type to this profession. And the acting was fantastic, Tilda Swinton, Melanie Thierry, and Christoph Walz captured their roles perfectly. Matt Damon seemed to be having an off day. Lucas Hedges (Bob) was adequate. What this movie lacked, and what made it hard to stay with, was depth of characters. It seems like this movie was written just for the visual effects. The characters are just there. They had no background, no depth. No time or care was given to give us a reason why we should care about them. For example when Bainsely ends up at his door with "everything she owns in her van", it would have been interesting to see how that happened. It would give us a reason to care about her. The same goes for Bob. He is the son of Management and won't do his father's bidding but why? A backstory would have made him more compelling, especially when he got sick. And why specifically the bodyguards? A scene with Management expressing worry about his son would have given us a reason to like or dislike the bodyguards. And Management. And the ending is ambiguous at best: Is he lying on the floor of his home in a coma? Did he achieve an out-of-body experience? Is it all a dream? Did he transcend physical existence? The end is unsatisfying to say the least. I did like the touch where after the credits role we hear the other characters saying hello to him, like they have appeared on the beach with him and have been saved from whatever-really-happened. That was clever. Great fun visuals, reasonable story line, great acting, no character development, ambiguous ending.

Saying that this is a Terry Gilliam film tells you a lot about what to expect: offbeat and sometimes downright weird visuals, nonlinear dialog, an obscure plot (if there even is one). Not to everyone's taste though.Qohen (Christoph Waltz) has been tasked by Management (a barely recognizable Matt Damon, who's certainly an odd choice for a Terry Gilliam script -- he's just too down-to-earth) to prove the Zero Theorem, which means that everything there is will add up ultimately to nothing. Working on the 'proof' seems to consist of a video-game-gone-wild where he must move blocks of preset equations around in a vast landscape of similar blocks. But every one of his attempts just ends in frustration and feeds his natural tendency to spiritual malaise and depression. Or something. It all seems rather aimless, which Management seemed to know all along. Young Bob (Lukas Hedges) drops in occasionally to stimulate Qohen intellectually, and Bainsley (Melanie Thierry) comes by for stimulation on the emotional++ side. But ultimately our hero still seems to prefer isolation.For the sets, think Blade Runner as rendered by a cartoonist on LSD. There's occasional absurdist humor, which is all in the backgrounds -- such as when Bob and Qohen are sitting in a town plaza where a phalanx of 'Forbidden' signs disallows every conceivable kind of activity appropriate for a community park, or even inactivity. And we get some genuinely arresting visuals along the way, such as the Virtual Reality beach of lurid colors where Qohen spends down time, or the giant black hole that haunts his dreams. These lead to a VR-within-VR fantasy scene where Qohen and Bainsley cling naked to each other while falling in to the same black hole.If you want linear storytelling, this isn't it. At the end I was left wondering what the point was -- any kind of point. The supposedly deep philosophical questions raised about life, the universe, human connections don't seems to go beyond sophomoric meandering. For the sake of the visuals though, I give this 5/10.

Terry Gilliam continues his surreal journey. I liked it until "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", but couldn't connect to any of his movies since then and this movie is not much different.The movie has a "Brazil" vibe to it, mixed with modern cyber technology, internet and the lack of personal interaction due to smartphone technology. Nothing profoundly new, really.I watched the whole movie, but did other things in the background. Some of the stuff is stretched to the limit (e.g.: the excessive ads, "The church of Batman"), but the movie itself is pretty minimalist, taking place in only few locations.Terry Gilliam definitely knows surrealism, but like with his former movies, I just didn't connect to it. I'm not even sure you can say there is a plot per se. "Twelve Monkeys" still remains his masterpiece.Tilda Swinton plays the same eccentric character as she did in "Snowpiercer". And it took me an entire movie to recognize Matt Damon.

Terry Gilliam has had a couple of motifs running through his movies. "Time Bandits" and "Brazil" (and also the opening sequence of Monty Python's "Meaning of Life") look at the desire to escape from our modern world, while "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen", "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and "The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus" go for full surrealism (I'm not sure where "The Fisher King" fits among these). But with "The Zero Theorem", Gilliam completes an unofficial trilogy: dystopia. "Brazil" depicts a bureaucratic, Orwellian society, while "Twelve Monkeys" depicts a future where a disease has forced humanity underground.In this movie, Christoph Waltz plays a programmer trying to find out whether or not life has any meaning (hey, an indirect reference to Monty Python's movie). But the society that the programmer inhabits is what caught my eye. It looks like a cross between "Blade Runner" and "Brazil", with a little bit of "Minority Report". Advertisements follow people everywhere. How could anyone even think about life's meaning in this setting? I actually wasn't as fond of this movie as I was of Gilliam's other movies. It was slower than most of his movies. Of course, one could argue that the movie's philosophical element required it to move slowly. Maybe so, but I still prefer Gilliam's other movies more. Maybe worth seeing once.