Six enterprising dwarfs arrange a grandiose journey through the tunnels of time for an ordinary boy named Kevin. The thing is that the tiny bandits have taken possession of a magic map that belonged to their former master – the Supreme Being who created the world.
With the help of the cherished map they travel from one epoch to another and get into the most amazing situations: they find themselves in the company of drunk Napoleon Bonaparte and King Agamemnon, set sail on a sea monster ship and the ill-fated Titanic, visit Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest and try to escape from the confinement of the Eternal Void.
4k movies reviews
Children’s night terrors are fertile ground for Terry Gilliam’s crazy ideas. He bursts into the bedroom of Kevin, a boy dazed by surprise, to take him on a mind-boggling journey through the holes of time from one era to another, from historical distances to legendary and fairy-tale worlds, which were so interestingly told in his home books.
The Napoleonic Wars and King Agamemnon’s Feast of Two, the adventures of the humane robber Robin Hood and the carelessness of the last moments of the Titanic’s passengers – familiar but eccentric events of the past, presented in Gilliam’s characteristic eccentric form, supplemented by encounters with the mythical Ogre and the inhuman-sized Fantastic Giant, make up a stream of adventures through which one can see the director’s obsessive desire to revise the books’ ideas about the times and the people who inhabited them.
Kevin only has to marvel at the folly of Napoleon, the “generosity” of Robin Hood and be enchanted by the good-naturedness of Agamemnon, whose images do not fit well with the generally accepted versions of historical folios.
Visually the picture is made in the style of naive realism of children’s drawings – hence the simplicity of cardboard scenery and nondescript forms of fantastic costumes, assembled almost from parts of household appliances. However, it is also connected with the idea of condemnation of the consumer society persistently promoted by Gilliam with unambiguous hints on the universal danger of technological progress, which threatens to turn the world into the kingdom of computer intelligence. In short, well known Gilliam’s horror stories, when the supreme mind appears in the business suit of a superior person, and his evil antipode – in clothes resembling a tricked-out kitchen machine.
For time travel, the movie came out unspeakably pale and little spectacular to go beyond mere amazement at the exotic images of historical personages, and the director’s hints about the technogenic threat to mankind are frankly cartoonish, making them impossible to take seriously.
Children’s adventures and civic satire exist here in parallel dimensions, and there is no hole between them that could connect these themes. Gilliam’s mixer breaks down like that food processor. And it’s not a defect of technique, but a failure of the director.
Info Blu-ray
Video
Codec: HEVC / H.265 (91.2 Mb/s)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: Dolby Vision, HDR10
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Audio
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English: FLAC 2.0
English: Dolby Digital Mono
Subtitles
English SDH, German.
