2035. The so-called Suez Canal Corporation pursues a policy of economic expansion in the stellar galaxy Kruger 60, achieving a monopoly in all spheres of life support and financial functioning of the languid galaxy, although within the Corporation itself the absurdity of bureaucratic management has reached truly disastrous proportions. Two ex-astronauts concoct a major insurance scam, starting with small contraband shipments bypassing the Corporation, but the term “worry of wits” hardly applies to these two space violators. They were not able to insure themselves against their own stupidity.
The film “Big Crazy” of 1969 by one of the co-authors of the “Oberhausen Manifesto” of the New German Wave Alexander Kluge is a rather typical political statement for the director, at first glance almost in detail coinciding with the theoretical calculations of the “young German cinema” from Kluge, Chamonix, Strobel and Reitz, consisting in the total triumph of ideological irrelevance and unquestioning change in the form of cinematic self-expression in the conditions of avant-garde, in which the personambers of the rebelliance of the revolutionary, mainly from the post-translative society, which the anti-translististentistist, the anti-fremistististististist, belonged to the post-statedor himself. Released at the moment of the inexorable decline of the Economic German miracle, Kluge’s “Great Crazy” is no more a science-fiction dystopia than the same “Alphaville” by Jean-Luc Godard, since the elements of the distant future serve only spectacular, but emphatically conditional frame in the author’s gloomy reflection on the demise of private property in the conditions of monopoly corporatofascism with all the ensuing. The film textual texture of the “Big Cuterma”, overnight perceived as the herald of the “Star Wars” of Lucas and “Brazil” Gilliam, is based on the famous work of Paul Baran and Paul Slime “Monopoly capitalism” of 1966, which in general in a century predicted the current power of a few transnational corporations over the leading countries of the world, and in this illustrativeness so vehemently denouncing the modern political and economic trends of the film director, sacrificed only the antithetical nature of his own state of the antithesis for his own observation and antithesis. By default, the System in the "Big Crash" will be much stronger and more dangerous, and the person who challenged it will remain nothing and nothing, dissolved by it in the sulfuric acid of its own totalitarian superiority, unlike the one overcome by it in other Kluge tapes, Various News or Patriot, for example. The director deliberately puts an ellipsis in the deliberately anti-American in spirit finale of the Great Kuterma, with its fatal bells of rebellion and intensifying terror.
The exposition of the film demonstrates a separate private tragedy of people who, not wanting to become cogs in the Corporation, which has already deprived them of almost everything but the opportunity to live, in vain try to find a new place of work and living - autonomous and economically free, but this is no longer possible. Power no longer belongs to them, and even once had a little more than others, people are in general equated with each other corporate leviathan, choosing for himself the role of judge and god, the main guardian of all existing economic flows and the arbiter of fates. The particular becomes general, the distant future is perceived as the very present, comprehended by the director with unspoken pessimism, since the heroes of the Big Kuterma and the heroes can be called with a very high degree of doubt, since in their actions they are not inclined to go a few steps forward; they are so averaged to the level of the smallest person that their momentary rebellion will be immediately suppressed, because they wanted to outsmart the System only from the outside, forgetting that it is important to accelerate its decomposition from the inside. The author does not give them sufficient intellectual abilities, although there is a notorious desire to overcome the Corporation, which does not abhor either genocide or, if necessary, war to get rid of excesses. However, this is the main tragedy of any person at the bottom of the food chain: to become a predator, he, of course, may, for a brief but desperately happy moment, can achieve something in this new social role, but, remaining in the depths of his soul as empty and worthless, not to be truly a predator until the very end. There will inevitably be a misfire, the mask of pretense will fall off and you will not be allowed to go around again. The system does not forgive such ingenious revanchism.