Okay, last month was “TV Shows”, and the month before that was “Pixar month”. I might actually make this month “Terry Gilliam month” with this film. If you aren’t familiar with Terry Gilliam, he has done films that are winners and losers. He is also a filmmaker with a very rich imagination.

One of his best works is The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. When it was first released in 1988, it was a film that cost almost $50 million, which was unheard of for a non-blockbuster type film. I have heard that so much money went into the special effects and production, that very little was spent on distribution. Sadly, the film was one of the biggest flops ever, but this is a judgment based on money rather than quality of story.

The story is about Baron Munchausen, who is actually a real figure of history. The real Baron Munchausen was a German nobleman who had reputation for telling the most ridiculous of stories. The film follows the Baron as he goes about doing some very incredulous things such as going to the moon on a hot-air balloon made of pantaloons, meeting the Roman god Vulcan and goddess Venus, and digesting in the belly of a great fish.

You know that any film that is going to show that is going to be very fantastic, and this film is as fantastic as it gets. Unlike most fantastic films of today, there is no dependence on computer graphics. All of these effects use models and other practical effects to achieve their illusion, and it does it pretty well.

At the beginning of the film, a small village is being terrorized by the Turks. As it so happens, Baron Munchausen is the cause of this conflict. He made a wager with the Turkish sultan, and the sultan was angry when the Baron won. The Baron makes an escape in the aforementioned hot air balloon in order to find his friends, who all have their share of superhuman abilities.

That’s the plot of this particular story. I remember seeing it decades ago and thinking that I liked it. I still like it now, but in all honesty, I still wonder what it is trying to say in a thematic sense. I believe that the moral of this film is that stories, even ones that are complete fiction, still have a power in and of themselves that reality is powerless to contend with. In other words, one cannot always rely on reason alone for dealing with problems, for where would inspiration stem from?

I’m going to go with that, because there are scenes in the film that are an odd mix of fantasy and fantasy with the fantasy. This is something that is common in a lot of Terry Gilliam films, and I might (emphasis on might) explore this month.