There’s not enough fear today about the future. Before the atom bomb, people loved the future. All we needed for a perfect world was a freeway system, TV and robots to help us run errands. After the bomb, the road ahead frightened us. We weren’t even sure if we had a future. Lately though, the future is friendly again. If global warming turns out to be real, the iPhone 20 will help us deal with it. If the race war breaks out, our video games have been training us for survival. If the apocalypse drops, it’s gonna look great on our high-def flatscreens. We’re not afraid of the future anymore because we feel like we’re already there.
We may be too relaxed about the future—and that’s why we need a cranky cynic like Terry Gilliam.
In his dystopian vision, the main problem with the future is that it’s unwieldy. Its technology and its increased bureaucracy add up to a giant weight on humanity’s shoulders—and it never gets lighter, only heavier. If there’s a Utopia, Gilliam’s world took a wrong turn off that road a long ways back. The only way to get there is to fake it through computerized reality that can always be shut off. Some of the most modern conveniences, such as working from home, are mere trap doors to tragedy. This is what happens to Christoph Waltz, beautifully wounded here as a meek Josef K.-type who’s so far gone in his role as a cog in the machine that he can only speak of even his most intimate feelings in the editorial “we”. He’s got a serious case of existential angst and a job in which he’s in charge of writing a program that will to solve an unsolvable equation. He goes crazy in the process, but he’s not as crazy as most around him.
Terry Gilliam reaches high here so he can bring us down. He considers it the end of an trilogy of bleak future visions that he started with Brazil. It’s not the same world, but a similar one, viewed from a different time’s perspective.