REVIEW - THE ZERO THEOREM

There exists a solid though susceptible few, some of them apparently very wealthy, who give credence to every vague notion dreamt up by Terry Gilliam, that most visionary of visionary filmmakers. He is, now that his reputation precedes his work, in excruciating need of critical voices around him, not actors game to submit to his daftest fantasies, not crew members devoted to his art, not independent financiers willing to cough up millions for the sake of producing said art, no matter what quality it may be. I'm tempted to suggest he needs the Weinsteins back. One wonders, though, if even the most gifted of advisors could have rescued The Zero Theorem, which would require an edit so brutal it would render the film both extremely short and extremely hard to follow; it's already one of those anyway, and unfortunately not the former. Between obsolete veteran Gilliam as director and obvious newcomer Pat Rushin as writer, the output manufactured here is shoddy, stupid and plain old crackpot, and forever cloaked in an air of incoherence that saps all the potential guilty pleasure out of it. And even once you can begin to see through the crude aesthetic, the noisy soundtrack, the amateur visual effects and the rocky acting, The Zero Theorem is defined and driven by two wholly unflattering sources. One is a tired warning against the unstoppable advancement of technology, and how it is impairing our ability to 'connect' with other human beings, and how our consumption-based lifestyles are set to overwhelm us entirely any day now. The other, and far more unsavoury, is the infuriating strain of sexism that rapidly begins to permeate every element of Gilliam's film as soon as it has been planted, in the form of actor Melanie Thierry. Gilliam, Thierry and Rushin all ought to be extremely ashamed of themselves. What they have brought into existence here is sickeningly sexist, and reduces an otherwise awful film to an offensive and offensively awful film.