I'll tell you what I saw: one of the most imaginative, entertaining, thought provoking, and downright hilarious movies I've ever seen in my entire life. I'm blown away. Speechless. I said wow. Etc, etc etc.
To tell the truth, I wasn't excited about watching the movie tonight. First I wanted to just play World of WarCraft, then I wanted to watch the game (lol Cowboys); hell, I had been putting off watching this for days after the disappointment of KOH. I am glad I watched it today. This is one of the best movies I've seen in ages, and a movie I absolutely HAVE to watch again.
The entire atmosphere of the movie pulled me in quite early. This was not only done with imaginative set designs and camera work, but also by biting satire and humor. It was as if this movie was made within the last couple years in the way that it touched on exactly what's going on now. While I'm certainly not one who believes terrorism doesn't exist (we do have enemies no doubt), there's no question that government plays a role in keeping the public "terrorized". It's a mentality that is bred, sometimes justly but many times un-justly.
Naturally a government's role is to protect its citizens, but this is complicated when that government is ineficient. To me, inefficiency seemed to be one of the main themes throughout the movie. Despite having some rather advanced technology, the movie depicted a society that simply didn't function well. Stopping terrorism is a hard job, especially for a group of people who find hassles in basic applications such as phones lol.
But I'm rambling as you can see. On nearly every level Brazil delivers. The acting is good, in part because it seems like it would be nigh impossible to ruin a movie written so well. The music was freaking amazing, perfect, and beautiful.
I really felt for the Sam. He was a competent yet disorganized man in a fully incompetent and disorganized society. Everything that could possibly go wrong for him seemed to go wrong. His job was basically to do someone elses, while getting paid less. His mom is a complete slut. His social life...non-existant. Yet escaping all of this was not too far away, in his dreams. In his dreams he's the Superman of his disorganized, dull live, constantly striving to reach his goal: to save the woman of his love. But how can he save her when he has to save everyone else too, and how can he leave them when they need him so bad?
When he finally meets the girl of his dreams (or at least the girl he projects his dreams on) he becomes obsessed with saving her, in real life. This leads to some rather insane events, most of which grabbed me. Like I said, the movie is just pure excitement packed into a granola brain bar. The dream sequences throughout the movie were surreal and sometimes confusing, but always impressive. And as the movie progressed Sam's dream world and real world began merging as he slowly began to gain mental freedom. At the end of the movie he seemed to achieve permanent freedom, a freedom that couldn't be interrupted by phone calls in the morning or overbearing mothers. Brazil it seems, to me at least, is a state of mind.
Overall I can't say enough about how impressed I am. I went into the movie with little expectations; I loved 12 Monkeys, but I thought this would be another snobby, decent 6.5 kind of movie. But oh, I was wrong. WOW. I have to take this back to Hollywood Video, but I would honestly consider buying this so I can watch it and disgest more. There was so much I missed. Little details I saw out the corner of my eye, like the catchphrases on the posters throughout the movie. Brilliant. If I have any complaint about the movie, it's that it seemed too long (like 15-20 or so), and sort of dragged towards the end.
9.5/10
