The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988)

Terry Gilliam's 1988 fantasia opens in a nameless walled city under Ottoman siege, where the local magistrate, styling himself The Right Ordinary Horatio Jackson, has just executed a soldier for the crime of performing an act of conspicuous bravery. The film's target is the Age of Reason itself: the tyranny of the sensible, the accountant's view of heroism. It is the third panel of Gilliam's Trilogy of Imagination, and it argues that a well-told lie is a form of survival. None of this constitutes a social program. The villain is a bureaucrat, not a landlord, and the film's contempt is reserved for rationalism, not for private property.

Then comes the tour of the absurd: a balloon stitched from women's undergarments, a voyage to the Moon, a king with two minds in one body, Vulcan's volcanic workshop, Venus waltzing in the air, a sea monster expelling the cast through its blowhole. Robin Williams appears as the lunar monarch under a pseudonym, and the production itself became a cautionary tale of studio politics and a budget that doubled. Sarah Polley, nine years old during the shoot, has since described conditions that no contemporary set would tolerate. The film's women exist as romantic memory or as pluck, and no argument is made about it. The surrealism is not a delivery system for a message about how we should live now. It is a delivery system for spectacle.

We are left with a picture that scores nothing on any contemporary index of social consciousness. No casting agenda, no identity themes, no climate anxiety, no anti-capitalist sermon, no body politics, no neurodivergent reading of the King of the Moon, no revised history, no lecture. It was nominated for four Academy Awards and won none, and it lost millions. Its moral concerns imagination, which is a moral about art, not about society at large. The film asks whether the city was saved by a story. It does not ask who was excluded from the city. On the current scale, that silence reads as a perfect zero.