The late 18th Century. "The Age Of Reason".

Wednesday.

An unspecified European city is under siege by a vast army. Fire licks from the barrels of cannons pounding the city walls. Amidst the chaos, in a small theater, a small troupe of suicidally determined actors are putting on a show for an audience desperate to drown out the endless cacophony of cannon fire and gunshots and screams emanating from outside. Their current production is an account of one Baron Munchausen, a fanciful figure depicted in a series of bizarre and spectacular adventures. The theater owner, Henry Salt (Bill Patterson), in addition to trying to keep the show running smoothly and appease a local magistrate (Johnathan Pryce), also has to deal with his young daughter Sally (a precocious, eight-year-old Sarah Polley, in one of her earliest film roles), who's miffed that the posters around the city advertising the play have the subtitle "Henry Salt & Son". But soon yet another monkey wrench is thrown into the works...

An elderly man suddenly bursts into the auditorium, disrupting the current performance and bellowing that they're mangling his life's story. Yes, this old man (John Neville, who X-Files fans may remember as the "Well-Manicured Man") claims to be the "real" Baron Munchausen, and soon regales the baffled actors and audience with a tale of one of his earlier sojourns, wherein he and his band of merry adventurers (including Eric Idle as the super-speedy Berthold, Jack Purvis as the diminutive, breath-y Gustavus, Winston Dennis as the super-stong Albrecht, and the film's co-screenwriter, Charles McKeown, as the skilled sharpshooter Adolphus) manage to best a wealthy Sultan (Peter Jeffrey) in a test of skill and make off with the entire contents of his treasure vault, invoking his great anger. In fact, according to the old coot, that's the Sultan's army trying to batter down the city's gates!

Now, with the city in mortal peril, the Baron agrees to seek aid in a dirigible sewn together from ladies' undergarments(!), little realizing that wee little Sally has stowed away aboard. Not able to set down and return her to safety, the Baron is forced to take her along on his quest to locate help for the besieged city. First stop: the moon, where the Baron and Sally meet the King of the moon (a suitably manic Robin Williams, billed in the credits as "Ray D. Tutto"), a jabbering, knowledge-crazed noggin on a floating platter desperately trying to avoid capture by - and re-attachment to - his libidinous body, constantly making lewd come-ons to his Queen (Valentina Cortese). The Baron and Sally are tossed into a giant birdcage, wherein they discover none other than Berthold, who has spent the last 20 years imprisoned after the Baron's last trip to the moon. Luckily for out protagonists, the Queen, smitten with the Baron, conspires to free them from the King's clutches. 

Attempting to climb back down to earth using a lock of the Queen's hair as a rope, the three slip and fall down, down, down into an active volcano, where they run into the subterranean Greek God Vulcan (the late Oliver Reed), a tantrum-prone brute married to the Goddess Venus (a luminous, 17-year-old Uma Thurman, in one of her earliest film roles, making a memorable entrance emerging naked from a giant clamshell... albeit in a discrete manner that preserves the film's chaste PG rating), who quickly takes a shine to the understandably dazzled Baron, who barely seems to register that he's inadvertently located another member of his old adventuring team, Albrecht (currently employed as one of Vulcan's serving boys). The Baron and Venus share a gravity-free waltz amongst the high-ceilinged ballroom, earning the jealous ire of Vulcan (steam jetting from his ears like Bluto in an old Popeye cartoon), who quickly tosses the Baron and his growing cadre of friends into a swirling whirlpool. Round and round and round they go, and where they pop up... ?

The South Seas, apparently. The soggy group finds themselves treading water in the middle of the ocean when they spot a nearby island, complete with an active volcano... but wait, that's no volcano! It is, in fact, the spume from a massive blowhole. Soon, the "island" reveals itself to be an enormous sea monster, which quickly swims towards out terrified protagonists and gulps them down in one immense swallow. Inside the creature's cavernous belly, the group finds themselves surrounded by a graveyard of ingested ghost ships, finding themselves attracted to one in particular, with light and music emanating from one of the windows. Inside, they find - hey, whaddaya know? - the final two members of the Baron's old team, Gustavus and Adolphus, swallowed years before and long since having lost hope of ever seeing the sun again. Hell, even the Baron's trusty steed Bucephalus is there! The Baron blowing a "modicum of snuff" into the creature's nasal cavity soon induces a massive sneeze, expelling the group from the monster's blowhole at throttling speed. Landing in a conveniently-placed life raft, the group then finds themselves - hey, whaddaya know? - on the shoreline of the very besieged city that the Baron and Sally left to find aid for in the first place!

Wading ashore, the Baron's exhausted compatriots beg off on the Baron's plans to send the Sultan's forces packing. Disgusted with the lot of them, the Baron storms off to the Sultan's tent and boldly confronts him, offering his neck in exchange for the city's safety. But when all seems lost, our group of rusty heroes have to shake off their lethargy to come to the Baron's rescue and augment the city's weakening defenses.

Essentially forming the third film in a loosely linked "power of imagination" trilogy (following 1981's Time Bandits and 1985's Brazil), The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen was roundly criticized at the time for it's then-absurd budget overruns (what was to have been a $20 million production rapidly ballooned to over $46 million, which may seems like peanuts today but made Munchausen literally one of the most expensive film productions of all time back in '88) and miniscule box office take (barely $8 million). Terry Gilliam quickly became the movie's scapegoat, the writer/director pilloried for letting the production get away from him, for being an egotist and perfectionist, for allowing his imagination too free a reign with other people's money. Yet, as he points out in one of the documentaries contained on this new DVD, despite all the hand-wringing and finger-pointing by studio heads, despite what a commercial calamity the film was, what's ultimately left behind to future generations is the film itself, and Munchausen is a lavish fantasy positively bubbling over with creative ideas, keen visual invention, and enthusiastically broad performances. There are points where Gilliam's sense of surreal whimsy does topple over into self-indulgence, and at 2+ hours, the film has a few too many narrative diversions, yet Munchausen is still a treat in a Hollywood establishment that abhors auteurist creativity.

What's more, in this current age of CGI, Munchausen stands as one of the last truly exceptional "practical" F/X extravaganzas. The film's elaborate and seamless use of matte paintings, miniature cities and monsters, rear-screen projection, and the like make this a feast for fans of 80's special effects techniques. When our heroes are gobbled up by that huge sea monster, yes, you can instinctively tell that it's a rubber prop in a giant water tank, yet you still can't beat the awe-inspiring verisimilitude of seeing all that water displaced as the creature's jaws yawn open in slow-motion. Like the old Toho Godzilla films, just knowing that you're looking at a creature that was meticulously created by hand has it's own curious power that transcends all the "mocap" nonsense of the most expensive productions of today.

Eccentric, vividly bizarre, spectacularly visualized, The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen is a must for fans of Gilliam or 80's fantasy films in general.

Presentation
I have not seen the previous DVD edition of Munchausen, so I'm not at liberty to say if this new transfer is an appreciable improvement, yet the picture looks mighty good, only marred slightly by the naturally grainy film stock favored by a lot of 80's films (most noticeable in the film's process shots, of which there are admittedly quite a few). The colors and black levels look fine, and there's no noticeable print damage. Very nice. The audio is what you'd expect from an 80's movie re-mixed for a 5.1 presentation, i.e. the only real beneficiary of the surround channels is the late Michael Kamen's eccentric musical score (mixing stirring, Robin Hood-style fanfares with weird instrumentalization and a few very silly songs penned by co-star Eric Idle). The dialogue and sound cues all sound fine, but this is not a really elaborate showpiece mix by any account.

Extras
Disc one of this two-disc set features nothing but an audio commentary with director Terry Gilliam and co-writer Charles McKeown, wherein they dish on the film's troubled production and examine the earlier, wildly extravagant screenplay that had to be pared down considerably when the budget started spiraling wildly out of control. Gilliam tends to give a good chat, and this is a lively track that fans of the film will enjoy.

The remainder of the extras are located on the second disc, starting off with the most important one, a three-part making-of under the blanket title The Madness & Misadventures Of Munchausen, starting off with Flights Of Fancy (29:43), continuing with Caught In The Act (16:50) and concluding with The Final Curtain (23:40). Thankfully given a "play all" function, this documentary goes into incredible detail on the film's production woes, and, with two decades hindsight, Gilliam and others involved with the film have free reign to really lay into the studio for their endless meddling.

In addition to Gilliam, there's interview material with cast members John Neville, Sarah Polley, Eric Idle, and Robin Williams, plus thoughts from production designer Dante Ferretti (a recent Oscar winner for his lavish work on Tim Burton's gore-soaked musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street), co-screenwriter Charles McKeown, and producer Thomas Schuhly.

There's fascinating tidbits about Polley's sheer terror at filming some rather unsafe scenes involving pyrotechnics, and how she was actually glad when the film shut down production for two weeks in the middle of the shoot. Snafus included the costumes accidentally being sent to the wrong airport, forcing Gilliam and his cast and crew to scramble in order to find things to shoot without them; how Gilliam and McKeown's vision of the moon sequence had to be radically cut down, which meant the original casting choice for the King of the moon, Sean Connery(!), had to bow out due to creative differences; how the film's elaborate miniature and green screen effects had to be brought back to London (overseen by cinematographer Roger Pratt) in order to save on costs.

There are also priceless bits with Idle referring to the film's financiers as "Horrible, lying shits" and Gilliam recounting a tale about how he became so incensed following a production meeting he put his fist through the windshield of a car, only to realize immediately afterwards that the car was his own! Overall this documentary ranks with the marvelous "Hamster Factor" doc on the 12 Monkeys DVD as one of the best no-bullshit making-ofs in recent memory. There's no fatuous EPK backslapping, just a meticulous recounting of one of the biggest commercial fiascos of the past 20 years, and how a pretty damn good movie got lost in the process (Columbia barely even released the film, not helping it make any of it's colossal budget back).

There's also 30:05 worth of storyboards (introduced and narrated by Gilliam and McKeown) involving a lot of material that was slashed from the script as the costs kept piling up, including "The Baron Saves Sally", "The Voyage To The Moon" and The Baron & Bucephalus Charge The Turkish Gates", a paltry 3:39 of deleted scenes ("Rules Of Warfare", "Extended Fish Sequence", "Mutiny On The Stage" and "Alternate Opening"), and the usual Previews menu, with trailers for Seinfeld Season 8, The Water Horse: Legend Of The Deep and The Final Season (Rudy! Rudy! Rudy!). Munchausen's own trailer is sadly MIA. 

Bottom Line
Messy, self-indulgent, episodic, and with a lot of stuff that doesn't make sense... and yet, equally fascinating, beautifully shot, and compellingly surreal. Gilliam's luck both creatively and commercially in the past two decades has been spotty, to say the least (not to mention the production woes that scuttled his Don Quixote movie and the recent, premature death of Heath Ledger that has thrown production of his forthcoming film The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus into a tizzy), yet films like Munchausen are what keep his fans coming back time and again, hoping for a little of the same oddball charge.