Terry Gilliam may be a member of Monty Python, but he truly belongs to the future. An animator by trade who fully took to feature directing beginning with 1977's Jabberwocky, Gilliam has had a career marked by the far-out and phantasmagorical, and though many of his works trade in fantasy, his finest output has come in the realm of science fiction. Those sagas have afforded him opportunities to create amazing, amusing, and horrifying worlds that hold a warped mirror up to our own times. Films like Brazil, 12 Monkeys, and his newest bit of dystopian insanity, The Zero Theorem (out this weekend), are brimming with all sorts of elaborately inventive ideas, environments, and techno-gadget whatsits. Here's how Gilliam's pioneering vision of tomorrow has influenced contemporary sci-fi.

All That Detail

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Pre-Gilliam sci-fi may have often taken great pains to fashion elaborate alternate universes, but Gilliam's contribution to the genre is to reimagine the future as a place absolutely crammed to the gills with stuff. The worlds of Brazil, 12 Monkeys, and The Zero Theorem are chockablock with newfangled doo-dads, crumbly relics from bygone eras, hallucinatory advertising materials, and a sense of artwork, architecture, and other various miscellanea slowly and irrevocably going to seed. That atmosphere of trashy pack-rat messiness makes Gilliam's science fiction feel lived in almost to the point of bursting, as well as conveys a sense of present-day culture constantly building upon all the things (art, technology, business and governmental structures) that came before.

The Grotesque Close-Up

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Gilliam's science fiction is mesmerized by the face, or more specifically, the freakish countenances of the rich, poor, and bureaucratic stooges who so frequently hold power. There's a carnivalesque atmosphere to Gilliam's sci-fi efforts that are most vividly embodied by the abnormal-looking characters who populate them, and especially, as in Brazil's plastic-surgery scene, their oblong, rotund, bulbous, stretched, squished, or curiously smushed mugs.

Beer-Goggle Camerawork

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If Gilliam's most notable visual trademark is the off-kilter close-up, a second would be his use of wide-angled lenses, which present a distorted deep-focus view of his odd landscapes and characters. The effect is that Gilliam's films seem like they've been put through the surrealistic wringer. From the lineup of inquisitors who give Bruce Willis his mission in 12 Monkeys, to the baby-faced masked figure in Brazil, Gilliam's sci-fi films use unsettling low camera setups, fish lenses, and canted angles that make it appear as if the universe has come slightly unhinged.

Sad-Sack Characters

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While Gilliam was hardly the first to give sci-fi stories a mournful undercurrent, his efforts are unique in how they combined individual and social malaise. Be it Jonathan Pryce's drone striving to escape his monotonous cog-in-the-machine reality via dreams in Brazil, Bruce Willis's time-traveler seeking to change his miserable circumstances through a mission to the past in 12 Monkeys, or Christoph Waltz's computer whiz trying to understand the purpose of his own existence in The Zero Theorem, Gilliam's sci-fi is marked by emotional and spiritual hunger for substance, and sorrowful longing for both a lost past and an unattainable happy future. They're movies that, despite their setting, involve characters stuck in stasis, which gives them their very particular, odd brand of sadness.

Free-Flowing Philosophy

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Ultimately, however, Gilliam's films are distinctive because of their rambunctious ruminations on desire, fate, love, free will, loneliness, and loss, all within the confines of overarching satires about individuals' relationship to government, big business, and their fellow man. Synthesizing Vonnegut, Dali, Marker, Descartes, and Looney Tunes (to name just a few inspirations), Brazil, 12 Monkeys, and The Zero Theorem investigate questions about the nature of self and the push-pull between knowledge and ignorance, freedom and slavery, and joy and desolation. These manic tales skewer the powers-that-be that seek dominion over our every waking moment. They're frenzied sendups of our failings and virtues, and as such, they've paved the way for modern science fiction to embrace outrage and absurdity in a manner that's both intimate and epic.

Nick Schager Nick Schager is a NYC-area film critic and culture writer with twenty years of professional experience writing about all the movies you love, and countless others that you don’t.

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