The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen (Terry Gilliam, 1988)

 

Great movies are very often huge box office bombs. Audience fails to see the greatness of a project, staying, as usually, in endorsing the banal, the acceptable, the norm, the one that goes by the book. There are numerous highly prosaic movies every year that become huge success, making you wonder what the fuck really happened and this banality won so much the hearts of people. More commonly daring projects fall under heavy and mean criticism, ending in losing a lot of money or becoming cult classics after some years. The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen is notorious for how much did it cost to Columbia Pictures, yet the movie is a revealing and touching masterpiece of roaring imagination. It's one of Terry Gilliam's best movies and one of the 80s selections that will live forever as one of the most harshly mistreated by audience movies.

The first time that I saw the movie (I have seen it uncountable times over the years) was when it came out in theaters. You must understand that I was very young, only nine years old and yet the movie made a huge impact on me. I remember my clear awe as I was watching the scene on the moon where the king of the moon along with his wife lived there. My imagination was so authentically and deeply intrigued that I was utterly consumed by the movie. And this is simply an example, the whole movie was something totally different from what I have seen in my life till that age. This creativity, this art direction, this story, these costumes, this flair of the movie made me change my opinion about what cinema could really produce. Till now Baron is one of the movies for me that have made a groundbreaking difference in the fantasy genre and I can say with ease that many films might have tried to reach its arguable perfection but very few have managed to get even near to this outcome. This movie is so utterly fantastic that you can't seem to have enough of it. Every time that you watch it is like watching a new movie that will have a totally different impact on you. The film is so filled with amazingly creative details that no matter how many times you watch it, it still stays as fresh as the first time.