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A fantastic adventure! Imagination required.
by Pulse (movies profile)
Mar 22, 2007
I first saw Adventure of Baron Munchausen in the mid-90's. It is the work of Terry Gilliam, whose imaginative movies certainly bend/twist the viewer's sense of reality. Watching this movie requires a bit of thought, beyond what is happening "on stage". Based in a time when reason & thought ruled the world of intellectual society, the Baron finds sanctuary & Life by escaping reality through the imagination of one little girl who believes in the far-fetched stories of the great Baron.
The Baron travels around the world with a band of characters, each of whom possesses a 'superhuman' ability. The Baron's own ability seems to be in the 'triumph of the will', at times he is the only one who realizes a way out of certain doom by acting on the feats of the characters coupled with his own story-telling. Thus it is the Baron's Storytelling that seems to fuel the little girl's belief in him, which then allows this melodrama to continue to where it does at the end with the 'Openning of the Gates'. I love the premise of this story, that a child's belief is what shapes the world and the reality in which we live. Because if we were all intellectual stiffs, then there would be no magic in reading Alice in Wonderland, or visiting Disneyland, or in watching Baron Munchausen!
This movie is one of my all-time favorites, Thank you Terry Gilliam for creating a movie outside the norm. A unique, excellent movie, you will NEVER see another movie like this one. The actors do a fantastic job - Eric Idol, John Neville, Uma Thurman, and Robin Williams are all great in this movie. This was the first movie I saw with Uma Thurman, she plays Venus, wife of mercury, who Baron puts the moves on. Hillarious. The scene where Uma reacts to being called a Flusie is most memorable.
I highly highly recommend this movie to anyone with the slightest imagination. Like all Terry Gilliam movies, it requires some good thought and reflection to appreciate. I've done quite a bit of reflection on this movie over the years, and even wrote a college term paper on the way the individual's subjective reality may challenge the objective logical perception of others.
As I wrote in the paper 10 years ago:
In “being”, we thus write the story; but by believing we are given control of the script. |
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