THE ZERO THEOREM no stars

I have to confess I have never really responded to Terry Gilliam's work. I always felt he never quite got a handle on things; not content to simply allow his imagination to soar he seemed to want to make movies that were also 'significant' and in doing so he fell between two stools. Both "Brazil" and "The Fisher King" are much admired but I have always found them cold, impersonal pictures, rather smug in their cleverness. His latest,"The Zero Theorem"
, is no different. It looks great and sounds terrible. This is old-hat '1984' sci-fi of the most banal kind. The most original thought in it's empty head is, let's make a dystopian Big Brother feature gaudy, playful and very, very colourful rather than grim, bleak and abstract. It wastes a very good cast, (Christoph Waltz, Matt Damon, Melanie Thierry, Tilda Swinton, David Thewlis), none of whom can do anything with the mediocre material. I won't even begin to describe what tries to pass for a plot which seems to have been cobbled together from 100 better films. I was going to say that maybe Terry Gilliam should get out more or maybe he really should stay in more and perhaps watch a few decent films.