12 Monkeys A Film Review By Michael Redman Copyright 1996 By Michael Redman
**** (out of ****)
Terry Gilliam's latest is a slam bang science fiction tour de force. Drawing from the same deep swirling pool of inspiration that he did for "Brazil", the former Monty Python member has another winner – at least for some of us.
Like most of his films, this is one of those `love it or hate it's. Some will find it brilliant, dark but dazzling. Others will find it tedious, dark but dazzling.
I've heard the plot referred to as confusing by some, but to anyone who's well-versed with time travel story lines, the themes are familiar. Bruce Willis is incarcerated in a hell hole of a prison in the future where the entire human population lives underground because of a deadly virus that covers the planet surface. `Volunteering' (more like being chosen by a giant grab-a-toy-with-the-claw machine) to be sent into the past, he gets a chance at freedom.
His mission is to return to 1996 and find a pure strain of the virus so the scientists of the future can return the people to the surface. Their time travel device, like many of the futuristic artifacts (which look as if they were borrowed from Brazil), isn't exactly high tech and only gets him to the right time after sending him first to 1990 and then W.W.I. During his stay in 1990, he is thrown into a mental institution where he meets Brad Pitt. Finally making it to the right time, he finds that Pitt is head of the animal rights group Army Of The 12 Monkeys, the organization thought to be responsible for unleashing the virus.
Bouncing back and forth from the future to our time and back again, Willis follows clues from incomplete historical records trying to find the virus only to discover that he, himself is the cause of most of the clues.
Come to think of it, the plot is somewhat convoluted, but in the end everything makes sense. Well, almost everything. The real key to the ending is the insurance salesperson sitting next to the red-haired scientist on an airplane. Which time period is she from?
There has been much talk about how this is a new groundbreaking role for Willis. In truth, it's not. He plays the same character that he has for years: tough guy beaten down time after time only to rise back up, bloody and broken, to go after the bad guys once again. The difference here is that he is even better at it than ever before. Willis may only play one role, but he's got that one down cold.
The surprise is Brad Pitt. Looking nothing like the Fabio clone from previous films, he is masterful as the insane prisoner turned ecoterrorist mastermind. Maybe he's more than just a pretty face after all.
[This appeared in the 1/17/96 "Bloomington Voice", Bloomington, Indiana. Michael Redman can be contacted at redman@bvoice.com]
-- mailto:redman@bvoice.com This week's film review at http://www.bvoice.com/ Film reviews archive at http://us.imdb.com/M/reviews_by?Michael%20Redman
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