You can talk about Terry Gilliam’s landmark dystopian downer all night. That’s because it’s so many different things at once. On one hand, it’s a comedy with poison-laced punchlines and razor-lined gags, British humor at its most bone-dry. On the other hand, it’s a drama that knifes you in the gut and leaves you to bleed to death. It’s a flawed masterpiece, a perverse vision unfettered for two-and-a-half hours (in its essential Director’s Cut) and full of imagery worthy of classic German Expressionism. It’s not perfect, but it doesn’t try to be. Gilliam’s already taking his audience on a ride to Hell so he may as well also let the film run overlong, be so frantic that it’s sometimes hard to follow and have it all spiral into a closing cacophony that stretches out like a blaring siren that won’t shut up. Some of us love it anyway, for the uncomfortable laughs and for its fierce directorial eye that fills nearly every shot with striking detail. The setting is the same kind of depressing world as George Orwell’s 1984, with the main difference being that Orwell’s government men were scarily efficient, while Gilliam’s are rank incompetents whose blunders bring horror. Here, one tiny error at a low level of the bureaucratic behemoth results in the arrest and death of an innocent man. A sweet-hearted clerk (Jonathan Pryce) crosses paths with the case and finds his dream girl (literally, the girl he sees in his dreams, as played an angel-faced Kim Griest) along the way. He also learns that she’s in danger because the government has branded her as a subversive, which leads to him poking at the Big Government Beast himself. Then, the Beast swats back.