Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits, is a wonderful 4th wall, 4th dimension breaking journey, but because of what I just mentioned it may be hard to take seriously. Often to watch certain movies we must suspend our disbelief.  To enjoy a movie about a man that can fly we must suspend our disbelief that such a premise is impossible, we must on faith accept this premise to be part of the story. JRR Tolkien in On Fairy Stories, might not make this explicit point but it has inspired in me an idea;  rather than suspending disbelief to follow a fantastical story, having a real belief in the world of fantasy allows a viewer to actually reach the story and further. 

The engagement of our mind is the essential difference between real belief and humoring the situation. Suspending disbelief requires one to numb the part of our mind that regulates truth from falsehood. True belief in extraordinary things is a matter of opening one’s mind to certain possibilities. However, such mental freedom is not easy. Time Bandits makes a claim that the gateway to fantastical worlds are and have been under siege by modern programing, and if this fight is lost we will lose the ability to have true autonomy of thought. 

Children are the most uncompromised thinkers of every generation; they have not yet been indoctrinated into "ordinary" existence, for them everything is new and potentially amazing. They still can play in the woods with sticks as if they are swords, they can still look at a man with a funny hat and think, “pirate!” In Kevin’s (Craig Warnock) case he can just get out of bed and follow a bunch of dwarfs through a rift in time, because that sounds wonderful. 

A child/free thinker has not locked down the possibilities of experience, so unless actual danger is presented fear will not arise from the fairy world becoming visible. In other words, the individual’s perception of reality will not break because it is not rigidly constructed. An adult if confronted with dwarfs invading their room will either go into denial, or have their reality shattered. To an average human past a certain age, the rules of the universe are very clearly established and anything that strays outside of that narrow scope is discarded, ignored, feared, and/or destroyed. 

The acceptable rules of the universe adopted by society have been established by scientific discovery. However, things were not always this way. Kevin visits a place called the “Time of Legend”, a place with ogres, monsters, and dark magicians. This place is reflective of a past where myths were real, and they explained the universe. Crops would be watered by the rain god. The ground may shake because of an actual giant under a mountain. Myth creates a reality; just as scientific views create a reality. 

Why things are the way they are vary depending on which view is adopted but both create a similar world; “earth orbits the sun because of gravity”, or “the sun is pulled along by Apollo’s chariot” result in a similar observation. In both cases every day it appears that the sun rises and sets. The big split in these views come from where on the pyramid humans stand; todays world is anthropocentric in every conceivable view point. In the age of legends, humans are no more special than other animals, and certainly of no importance to the gods. Now its not hard to see why society chose science, but that choice is not without consequences. 

Picture this; identical houses for as far as the eye can see, every notion of natural land destroyed and replaced with green AstroTurf, anything resembling a sentient being is either cooking on a grill or glued to a digital screen. All thoughts are created by the machines than passed on directly into each brain. That is the world of today. That is the life sucking world that Gilliam warns we must escape.