This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

There is just so much movie here. For some it may be too much. But in the same secretly sarcastic way most telemarketers say the phrase, the title of this one is particularly apt.

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Brazil is one of those movies that I really want to love. The cinematography is fun, the acting is almost always spot-on, the humour never falls flat, the world is complex and fully-realized... and yet... it seems to forget why the movie exists.I'm writing this review assuming that you have already watched the movie and in this review I will be discussing spoilers and plot-points that could have been tweaked to help fix the movie.Now I must give credit where credit is due: The world of Brazil is amazing. Every aspect of the world is hilarious and bizarre, but it all makes sense. It is a world where bureaucracy and paperwork is more important than having a soul and getting a job done correctly. Everyone is nervous and anxious to move outside of the borders of their role because it could create a domino effect that might ruin the whole of society (or so people seem to believe). Trying to fix your heating unit? You better have the paperwork and the authority to do so or it might mean trouble.What makes this future even better is that no one seems to be inherently evil. Malicious? Maybe, but definitely not "evil". It is simply run by a bunch of buffoons and people who think that if they stick to code and order that everything will turn out hunky-dory. The cops who kidnap people from their homes? They don't feel guilt because they were following paperwork. The man who tortures people for information? Not his fault if someone innocent dies because he was well within the parameters of the paperwork that was given to him. The bureaucratic future has very clever satire and, rather unfortunately, predicting elements of the future quite well. But what about the plot?Brazil starts off very strong, but I can say that there is consistently a point in the movie where I always mentally clock-out and start to lose interest:The relationship with Jill. She isn't handled well in this movie... at all. Jill is a young woman who is trying to help her neighbor who has suffered at the hands of bureaucracy. With what little we know about her, we at least know that she is determined to try and make things right and seems a bit fed-up with how everything works. This makes her seemingly the polar opposite of Sam. She is rough and he is soft. Sam is a bureaucrat who claims to like his current job and that he has no other dreams or ambitions in the world. However, in his dreams, we see that he is longing for an escape and he believes that love is the only way out. This loneliness and desperation for escape leads him to fall in love with the picture of a woman whom he has never met and chase after her consistently with very unrealistic expectations. In short, he expects her to save him emotionally, while he tries to save her from the injustice of the bureaucracy, and deep down inside he also wishes that the bureaucracy would be destroyed.This is a really good set-up: A hopeless romantic trying to fall in love with someone due to his desperation of wanting to leave bureaucracy. This isn't love. This is him putting expectations onto someone and hoping that it turns out the way he has it imagined in his head. For this to be interesting she can't fall in love with him. Jill needs to not meet up to his expectations, so as to show just how unrealistic and crazy Sam is becoming (which would fit into the ending of the movie).When Sam first enters the truck with Jill there is immediately a clash between the two. Jill thinks he is some random creep who is following her (which he is) and Sam expects her to save him from bureaucracy. He starts telling her to do all of these crazy things to meet his expectations of who she is and to fulfill his dream of screwing over the bureaucracy. And yet, for some reason... she does fall in love with him. A funnier and more interesting version of this movie could've had Sam consistently chasing her down where he gradually becomes more and more insane due to his desperation intensifying, and in the end she would still die the same way, but this time it would fit more with the theme of the movie because it would be his want for escape that leads to the death of his escape. The final minutes of the film have Sam believing that he has ran-off with Jill, when in reality she is dead. To me, this ending would have a bit more sting to it if Jill never really loved him because it (once again) would show that Sam's imagination does not reflect reality. He wants an escape with a lover who doesn't love him, and even after his escape is dead he will still imagine that there is a way out.Further issues with Jill's character is that she seems to lose all sense of character after she falls in love with Sam. What happened to Jill fighting the injustices that befell her neighbor? What happened to the rough and tough character? By the end of the movie she simply becomes the thing that Sam wanted her to be, which, AGAIN, doesn't fit with the themeing of the movie. She lives up to all of his expectations when Sam's expectations are SUPPOSED TO BE UNREALISTIC. This single-handedly destroys a big chunk of the movie, and to make matters even worse, their chemistry feels very forced and is boring. Everything in the movie is more interesting than their relationship and yet it is the focus of the story! All in all, Brazil has a very interesting set-up and world, but it has poor pay-off and seems to leave a lot of loose-ends hanging about. The ending itself doesn't bother me, but what leads up to the ending does. Obviously, there are more issues with the movie than what I wrote, but I think what put the most strain on my attention span was a lack of focus and a boring relationship that didn't seem to fit into what was being set-up.

Brazil is one of the strangest movies I have ever seen, yet it is not out of character for Terry Gilliam. Jonathan Pryce stars as a mid level bureaucrat in a dystopian world that is a cross between 1984 and the DMV. In this fiscally-conscious big brother government that charges prisoners for their interrogations, there is a form for everything and the bureaucracy dominates all aspects of life. The plot is meandering and plays second fiddle to the absurdist aspects of the movie.There are no likable characters, so there is no reason for the viewer to care what happens to anyone. There are a few interesting characters, namely Robert De Niro and Bob Hoskins as the two opposite sides of the central air repair business. Ultimately, not much actually happens, and a fair bit of what happens is simply absurd side plots that go nowhere and add nothing to the story.

Gilliam's dystopian masterpiece is set in a near future where bureaucracy has taken over all aspects of life. Jonathan Pryce stars as an unambitious functionary who dreams of being a winged hero who saves a beautiful girl from monsters. While attempting to close off a case where the wrong man was arrested and murdered due to a typo, he meets this woman in real life. Gilliam constructs a labyrinthine satire about how technology and bureaucracy destroy everything that makes life good. The film's retro-1940s-noir-future look enhances the satire by filling the film with elaborate, near-useless archaic technology that hinders the characters at every turn. Pryce has never been better and is ably supported by a magnificent cast that includes Ian Holm, Michael Palin, Robert DeNiro and Bob Hoskins. One of the most inventive and surprisingly downbeat sci-fi films of the 80's.

This review does contain a spoiler to the ending! Please watch the movie Brazil before reading this review! Enjoy! Reality and Fantasy… these concepts are heavy themes in the movie Brazil (just look at the film's poster artwork!). Cross-references are predominant at critical shifts. One example is when Sam leaves Jill's apartment and the word REALITY is graffitied in the ally. This at the same time the fantasy theme music "Brazil" can be heard playing over the radio in his car. This is clue to the audience, telling us we must be careful what we believe is truly going on. This fight between fantasy and reality on screen is sometimes called "magical realism." This is how director Terry Gillian chose to describe the film given it presumably takes place in our real world but with everything imagined so differently. The world as it would look under an oppressive, secretive government.In most dystopia films the hero tends to believe in his fantasies of a better life so powerfully that it launches him to combat his reality. It's that fantasy that gives him the courage to become a hero. This is nowhere more true than in Sam. His life is so out of balance that he often will voluntarily gets lost in his fantasy of flying high in the clouds where he meets a beautiful woman. This is true for some people, although it tends to go by the term, Delusion. I often wonder, If you sit in your bed for hours and dream about your fantasies, then is it true that your fantasy is your reality for the time you spend sitting there? Fantasy & reality, the cycle of life and death, and the concept that life is just a dream are fundamental ideas in most secret societies. The Ministry of Information is a type of secret society. The symbols of secret societies are often in plain view and will reveal many truths to those who are inducted into the society, or those who are able to analyze the messages themselves. I believe the shape of the letter "i" is indicative of two things. One, it's a cross-reference to the "all seeing 'eye'" and two, its in the shape of a coffin. The information that differentiates us from animals, the knowledge of our own death.Sam's dreams are his way of escaping his reality. If he consumes himself in his fantasy long enough then in essence that becomes his reality and the horrific presence the Ministry plays in his life. This is true in the final torture scene as well. He checks out of the real world and fantasizes what he would have liked to have had happened. This is how he escapes the pain of his torture. but even that fantasy crumples apart into a nightmare.Gillian also pays attention to the different ways people observe their fantasies. Sam's mother, for example, fantasizes about being young and has every plastic surgery she can to maintain a "youthful" appearance. She is actually truly altering her appearance. She looks in the mirror and is so satisfied, but is she really beautiful? And again, some people do this only it tends to be called Body Dysmorphia. But this is true for Sam too. In his fantasy himself and Jill are both much more good looking then they actually are.