Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5831 in DVD
• Released on: 2008-04-07
• Rating: Parental Guidance
• Format: PAL
• Number of discs: 2
• Running time: 121 minutes

Amazon.co.uk review

Monty Python's Terry Gilliam (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Brazil) directs this wild and wonderful version of the stories of Baron Munchausen, pushing the limits of 1989 special effects technology to bring us such sights as a horse divided in half and running around in two parts, and a giant Robin Williams with his head flying off his shoulders. Basically, this is a treat for Gilliam fans, as the sustaining idea of the film runs out of steam, and manic energy alone keeps the momentum going. Casual viewers might find it tedious after a while. There are nice parts for fellow Python Eric Idle, as well as Sting, Alison Steadman and Uma Thurman as a dazzlingly beautiful Venus on a half-shell. Gilliam had greater artistic and commercial success with Brazil, The Fisher King, and 12 Monkeys. --Tom Keogh

Synopsis
In Time Bandits, director Terry Gilliam told a fantastical story filled with heroes and villains as seen through the eyes of a small boy. In Brazil, he focused on a fantasy world created by a young man trapped in a totalitarian state. With The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Gilliam tells the legend of an old man who has lived a fairy-tale life. In the late 18th century, the Age of Reason has no room for fantasy. In a town besieged by murderous enemies, a travelling company is putting on a stage show about the apocryphal Baron Munchausen, who, with his motley crew of servants, supposedly circled the globe and the universe, following each bizarre adventure with one even more strange and ludicrous. But then a man appears at the theatre claiming to be the real Baron, and to prove it, he goes off on one final journey to save the town, chased all the way by the winged spectre of death.
Gilliam never met an epic spectacle he didn't like. Munchausen is loaded with brilliant set pieces, including spinning heads on the moon and a giant Botticelli clamshell in the bottom of a hellish volcano. Gilliam has assembled a stellar cast, including John Neville as the Baron, Oliver Reed as Vulcan, Jonathan Pryce (Brazil), Jack Purvis (Wally in Time Bandits), Robin Williams (credited as Ray D. Tutto), Eric Idle (who contributes 'The Torturer's Apprentice' with Michael Kamen to the soundtrack), Charles McKeown (Life of Brian), a cameo by Sting, and early appearances by Sarah Polley (as young Sally Salt) and Uma Thurman. Gilliam's special effects bonanza is a modern retelling of The Wizard of Oz, a fabulous adventure filled with daring feats, preposterous nonsense, danger galore and the overall belief that a world without fantasy is a sad world indeed.

Customer Reviews

Outstanding film - average edition...
'Munchausen' is a truly great film. It's Terry Gilliam's finest film (debatable) and certainly - in terms of production - the most controversial.

The film - for those unfamiliar - tells the tall tale of the Baron attempting to save a beseiged city from the Turkish army and end a war he claims responsibility for. In order to do so, the aged Baron must quest to find his faithful servants whilst accompanied by Sally Salt - the child protagonist and main focus of the movie.

For 2 hours you are treated to a spectacularly lavish fantasy world from a trip to the moon in a balloon made of knickers, to the pit of a smouldering volcano, the belly of a whale and then to an amazing final battle in which everything, but death, can be finally conquered.

The film is an examination of the merits of fantasy and imagination over logic and 'reality'. It's also - if anything - a film about women. The male characters in Munchausen are all blustering fools or imasculated 'touchy feely' types that have lost what vitality they once had and have slipped into old age, or divinity, or politics with little sense of self left. Munchausen is a liar who childishly ages with every passing emotion, desperate to keep hold of the past. His companions are deluded and put upon, having little faith in themselves or the Baron and his attempts to save the city. In every mini-adventure, it is the women that save the day. This role reversal of gender stereotypes speaks volumes and I'm amazed nobody else has picked up on the theme. At the end of the day, through the ages of women on show to the various men - it is Sally Salt who is the 'perfect ideal' of womanhood, even over Venus herself. And it is this ideal that helps the men find themselves once more. I don't even know if Gilliam realises the subtext of his own film as it goes unmentioned in the excellent commentary (some rubbish about Thatcher and Iraq is given instead by the increasingly forgetful Gilliam and McKeown) or in the 70 minute documentary on disc 2 of this release.

Unfortunately, as wonderful as the film is, the 'spectacular' double disc release is pretty average. A bitchy (swear filled - parents take note) documentary on the making of the film is interesting, but the deleted scenes are so-so and unless you really want to hear Gilliam and McKeown act out voice overs to drawing for cut scenes, there's very little else on here to recommend.

I can't say that I've noticed any major difference on the print used for this release. Still, it's worth the price for fact that the film is a classic, you get the very funny commentary and find out what the horse went onto after making this film.

"What will become of the Baron?"
21 years after the off-screen battles are over and unrealistic expectations have all been exorcised, Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen looks really rather wonderful. If anything it's probably too wonder-full to ever appeal to a mainstream audience as Gilliam plays out the eternal conflict between mundane and unexceptional reality and dreams and imagination in the palaces of sultans, the kingdom of the moon, the inside of Mount Etna, the belly of a whale and points inbetween as the teller of tall-tales hitches a ride on a cannonball, flies to the stars in an airship made from women's underwear and dances with Uma Thurman's goddess Venus in the air as waterfalls and cherubim surround them and Oliver Reed's rather wonderful god and munitions manufacturer Vulcan (played like a cross between a Northern mill owner and Gumby from Monty Python's Flying Circus) hops angrily up and down below them as his temperature rises to danger levels. As John Neville's Baron himself says, "This is precisely the sort of thing that people never believe."

Terry Gilliam's `Fellini film' - indeed, many of his collaborators (Giuseppe Rottuno, Dante Ferretti) are Fellini veterans - was much criticised as being all hot air and fantasy with no real foundation, but in fact the script is a lot better than it was ever given credit for. Beautifully structured as a ramshackle but ingenious play gradually becomes the Baron's `reality,' the figure of Death constantly hovering on the sidelines of the Baron's adventures that periodically rejuvenate him, it's end is somewhat disappointing as it paints itself into a fantastic corner, but getting there is a lot of fun. While there's much Pythonic humor along the way, it's not always entirely successful: the scene on the moon fares worst, largely due to a very loud and unfunny cameo by a literally off-his-head Robin Williams, here billed as Ray D. Tuto after his agent allegedly told him the film could be a career-killer (the original conception of the sequence was very different, with Sean Connery taking the role of the King of the Moon only to be dropped to keep the budget down: typically for the film, it cost more to cut it than it would to have shot it!). Yet even here it's a constantly astonishing looking film: where with fantasy films you often see amazing pre-production concept sketches that the film's visuals can never match, here they exceed them. The sheer unique old world craftsmanship the Italian artisans bring to the film is breathtaking, reminding you that this could never have been shot in a Hollywood studio. The effects work is amazing, all the more so for being largely physical effects that have more weight to them than the too often poorly integrated and lighter than air CGI. Even Michael Kamen rallies to the cause with a splendid score that captures the spirit of its vainglorious fantasist hero. Hot air and fantasy it may be, but gloriously heroic nonetheless.

After years of being available with only a trailer as extra, this new special edition finally does the film justice with an audio commentary by Gilliam and co-writer Charles McKeown, deleted scenes and 72-minute documentary The Madness and Misadventures of Munchausen.

A cast of thousands! Elephants!! Hot air baloons!!! The Sultan bested by our Hero!!!!
OK, I recently reviewed Brazil - another Terry Gilliam movie - and said that it's the best movie of the 20th century. I guess that I really meant, "alongside Baron Munchausen", because this is also a masterful work.

Flawed, yes - deeply so; probably as a result of Gilliam and McKeown overreaching themselves to produce a hugely challenging film. According to the "Making Of.." documentary extra (and indeed movie making folklore) the birth was an agonising one and nearly a stillbirth. If you believe some of the claims, the production was horrendously overspent even before filming began and relations between the crew broke down to the extent that the producer and director wouldn't even speak to one another on set, and no-one really knew how much the film was actually costing.

Perhaps as as a result of the production company's damage limitation efforts the plot is an incoherent mess: but don't lose heart - if you accept it as being almost irrelevant to the film itself, you can happily sit back and enjoy the performances, the humour and the glorious spectacle of it.

For me, the most enjoyable performance came from Sarah Polley as the little girl who may or may not be dreaming the whole story up, with honoourable mention going to Peter Jefferies as the Sultan (look out for his serenade to the Baron on his "torture organ"). By contrast, I found Robin Williams' cameo as the King of the Moon simply annoying, but then I've always found his brand of humour seriously over the top.

The spectacle is truly sumptuous and I suspect that Peter Jackson would have thought twice about what Gilliam was trying to achieve. Some of the sets do look very contrived (outside the Sultan's palace and when Eric Idle pops out to Vienna for a bottle of Tokay) and amateurish. I wondered whether this was the effect of the spiralling costs, but it does give the film a dreamlike quality in places and it actually carries it off well, so perhaps it was intentional. The ending was possibly the biggest disappointment of the film - a terrible anticlimax - and again this may be down to the film's problems.

All in all, my balance sheet added up very much in the black. If you allow yourself to be entertained, forgive it its flaws and pay attention to the details, I suspect that you'll love it. You might hate it, so read the reviews carefully before you buy it.

"I have learned from experience that a modicum of snuff can be most efficacious."