TIME BANDITS

TIME BANDITS. Terry Gilliam, dir. UK: Handmade Films, 1981.

A fantasy film that could be subtitled "Monty Python and the Royal Shakespeare Meet the Problem of Evil." Significant here for associating mechanization with mythic evil (as Ralph Bakshi had done in his animated fantasy WIZARDS, q.v.) and having that association work in a serious comedy: the Satan-figure is both a proponent and embodiment of things mechanical and cybernetic. At the end of the climactic battle, the devil's lair is littered with artifacts of human military technology from ancient Greece through the 21st c., and the Adversary has only barely been stopped, by divine intervention, from computerizing his operation. See T. Holt's Who's Afraid of Beowulf?, under Fiction.