What ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’ Borrows From Terry Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’
Posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2019 by Bryan Young
(Welcome to The Movies That Made Star Wars, a series where we explore the films and television properties that inspired or help us better understand George Lucas’ iconic universe. In this edition: Brazil.)
The 1985 release of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil was nothing short of a miracle. The executives at Universal were so disappointed with Gilliam’s grim vision of the future that they wanted to recut it and give it a happy ending, but Gilliam refused to be beaten down by the system. He fought and fought and fought until the executives were forced to relent. Ironic that a film about trying to beat the system from within and losing (mostly) was only released because a filmmaker fought the system and actually won.
Brazil tells the story of Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) as he navigates an Orwellian hellscape with bliss until his dreams become too much. When he decides he needs to follow those dreams, the society he’s lived in with aplomb actively works to destroy him. While they might destroy his body, though, they’d never destroy his spirit.
Arguably, Brazil is Gilliam’s definitive masterpiece, evoking everything he is as a filmmaker and storyteller and boiling it into one dystopian nightmare. It’s a study in stark contrasts as well. In one particularly funny (and disturbing scene) Sam Lowry is dining with his mother (Katherine Helmond) and her rich and decadent friends when a terrorist’s bomb explodes in the background. None of the rich folks seem to notice and the restaurant staff erects accordion walls around them so they don’t have to witness the world literally falling apart around them. For as big as the film is, it’s always oppressively personal. For as funny as it is, each laugh threatens to become a sob as you realize just how bleak the universe really is.
This is Terry Gilliam’s view of the human condition, it seems, and it’s as hilarious as it is terrifying.
