12 MONKEYS
A film review by John Robertson
Copyright 1996 John Robertson
Directed by: Terry Gilliam Starring: Bruce Willis, Madeline Stowe, Brad Pitt, Frank Gorshin, Michael Malone, David Morse, and Christopher Plummer.
Perfect Person Rating*: The Perfect Person for this film is is a person with an appreciation for Terry Gilliam's sense of style, a lover of science fiction, and The Twilight Zone as well as the top three stars of the film. The Perfect Person would probably give this film a 10 out of 10.
Twelve Monkeys is a remake of the film La Jetee (1962), and although I have not seen the original, I think I understand what it is about, and have a new appreciation for it. Twelve Monkeys has a plot that we have seen before, though not often in a Hollywood film.
Bruce Willis plays a man from a horrible future, where mankind has almost been wiped out by a virus which ravaged the earth in 1996. A convicted felon, he is volunteered to perform a mission in the not so distant past, to try and find the origin of the plague so scientists of his time can create a cure in their time.
Willis' time travel is slightly off the mark, and he ends up arriving in 1991 instead of 1996, and to make matters worse, he assaults a policeman and finds himself in an insane asylum after babbling about his "mission" to find the Army of the Twelve Monkeys and stop a virus that will wipe out humanity in six years.
Madeline Stowe is Willis' psychiatrist, and Brad Pitt is a fellow resident of the insane asylum. After several days of treatment, followed by a return to the future and several trips back into several pasts, Willis, Stowe and Pitt's lives become intertwined in a web of causality, flashbacks and flash forwards, and questions about just who is insane and who isn't.
All three main actors give surprising performances, particularly Pitt, who although not shy about taking non-leading man, non-beefcake roles in the past, plays a role that is something of a departure for him.
Twelve Monkeys is a fine film and I recommend it highly to anyone who comes close to the Perfect Person profile above. Although there are holes in the film, what time travel film is without them?
* Perfect Person Rating: The Perfect Person Rating is an attempt to give the reader a new way of understanding my rating. Rather than give a film a score, either overall, or on several attributes, the Perfect Person Rating tries to identify the type of person would enjoy this movie the most. Since a reviewer is by nature someone with a great deal of experience in what they are reviewing, their experience may not be the same as someone who is less informed, less jaded, or more attuned to the subject. Hopefully the Perfect Person Rating will go further toward eliminating reviewer bias than a simple rating scale. Comments are appreciated.
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