Muriel Award: 25th Anniversary Award for Best Film of 1985

I honestly expected our second-place finisher in this category to be the winner. (And I say this as someone who, shamefully, has yet to see it.) I love the winner. I voted for it. But I figured Kurosawa would not be denied. Shows what I know.

Third place:



After Hours (Martin Scorsese) [110 points / 19 votes]

Second place:



Ran (Akira Kurosawa) [128/19]

And your winner...





Brazil (Terry Gilliam) [144/21]

"A film like Brazil actually becomes greater when viewed in the world of today, where a director’s vision, no matter how grand or far reaching, is easily realized with CGI and digital photography. Brazil comes from a time where directors dreamt big, but budgets and technological limitations often got in the way and many dream projects remained dreams, never to become films. Gilliam’s 1985 masterpiece, a large scale visionary sci-fi epic/satire and quite possibly the best sci-fi film in a decade dominated by great sci-fi films, feels like one of those dream projects that shouldn’t have come true. Thankfully, it did. The baroque sets and intricate miniatures used to depict the nightmarish Orwellian future-world lent the production a much-needed physicality, with the film never feeling too far removed from the actual world. Had it been rendered using today’s more affordable computer generated imagery, Gilliam’s sharp satire would potentially have been lost amidst the hollow graphics and cheap 3-D thrills that dominate much of today’s sci-fi fare.

The story deals with a young bureaucrat named Sam Lowery (Jonathan Pryce in a career defining performance), a meaningless paper pusher in a totalitarian society where life has devolved into a complex web of systematic processes overseen by faceless authorities. Lowery escapes his dreary existence by imagining himself a winged crusader who flies to the aid of a beautiful blonde; like all of Gilliam films, the boundaries between the real and the imagined soon begin to crumble and, with it, the sanity of our protagonist.

The production design is dominated by networks of convoluted ductwork and twisting cables, and in one of the film’s best scenes, Harry Tuttle, a repairman-cum-revolutionary (Robert DeNiro), breaks into Lowery’s apartment to aid in the repair of a broken air conditioner - something that would require loads of paperwork and bureaucratic red tape to get properly fixed. When he removes a panel from Lowery’s wall, revealing an absurd mess of wires and ducts, seemingly alive and in chaos, the metaphor is all too apparent; beneath the surface lies the system, and we are all slaves to the system. Harry Tuttle bucks the system by performing his own repairs, taking back that small bit of freedom that government regulation has deprived him. 25 years after the release of the film, our world is inching ever closer to that which is depicted in Brazil. The threat of terrorism looms large, government regulation and involvement in our private lives grows by the day, and social networking has created a virtually 'wired' society more complex than anything behind Lowery’s walls. There’s truth to all science fiction, so here’s hoping a real-life Harry Tuttle is not too far off." - Adam Lemke

See the full results.