Release date: March 14th In the 1980s, Brazil gave us a mix of farcical satire, dark duct-filled dystopia and soaring fantasy in what remains the best vision of a 1984-style story ever committed to film. In the 1990s, 12 Monkeys threw Bruce Willis back from a grim underground future to rescue the past, only to wind up in an asylum with cracked eco-terrorist Brad Pitt. Now Terry Gilliam is preparing what he calls the final part of his trilogy of dystopian satires: The Zero Theorem. Gilliam has often struggled to get films made. His odd imagination has been hard for conservative financial backers to get their heads around, while various productions have seemed beset by disasters, from the floods that destroyed Don Quixote's sets to the death of Heath Ledger during the filming of The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. In this case an original 2009 start date was postponed when star Billy Bob Thornton refused to film in London due to his fear of antiques (yes, really). Christoph Waltz, replacing Thornton, appears as Qohen Leth, a bald computer programmer suffering an existential crisis and searching for the meaning of life as he attempts to make the data equal zero in a complex equation/game. If that all sounds a little cerebral, the garish production design and presence of "The Church of Batman the Redeemer" hint at Gilliam's usual sense of the silly beneath the satire of our digital world and digital relationships. When a rough cut of The Zero Theorem premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year, reviews ranged from "perfect" to "another noble failure." We'll have to wait until March to find out whether it is a match for the previous two dystopias or if it's more of a piece with Dr. Parnassus. What is certain, however, is that even when failing Gilliam is never anything less than interesting.
