Film
What's on at the cinema plus reviews of the latest movie and DVD releases
Bookmark this page12 Monkeys (1995)
Director: Terry Gilliam
Movie review
From Time Out Film Guide
In 1996, a virus kills five billion people. 'This already happened,' James Cole (Willis) explains to Dr Railly (Stowe) in 1990. He knows because he's been there. Six years and a matter of minutes after he vanishes from a padded cell, Cole is back in his psychiatrist's life. He must trace the contagion, but he needs Railly's help to track down former patient Goines (Pitt), whose environmental action group, the Army of the 12 Monkeys, may be behind the disaster. With its shifts in tone and style signposted by Pitt's buggy loony-toon and Willis's movingly bewildered introvert, Terry Gilliam's apocalyptic fantasy is even weirder than it sounds. Less a Terminator-type action pic than a spectacularly disorienting inaction movie, with Cole as a helpless Cassandra hooked on an image from his own past, hoping against hope that he may in fact be crazy...the film's a terrible mess, but a terribly beautiful, tender mess. The screenplay by Janet and David Peoples (Blade Runner, Unforgiven) takes off from Chris Marker's 1962 short, La Jetée, but soon spirals into more pressing millennial obsessions (insanity, chaos and ecological catastrophe), before a vertiginous Hitchcockian make-over in the last reel. Gilliam gives the material a lunatic poetry of his own, but remains impervious to the requirements of narrative pacing.Author: TCh
Cast & crew
Director: Terry Gilliam
Producer: Chuck Roven
Cast: Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, Brad Pitt, Christopher Plummer, Joseph Melito, Jon Seda full cast
Genre(s): Fantasy
Duration: 129 mins
Most popular on this site
Top Stories
Has David Cronenberg turned tame?
Has director David Cronenberg veered too far from his radical and bloody roots with new film 'A Dangerous Method'?
The 10 worst date movies
Just in time for Valentine's Day, we present ten of the least romantic films ever made
Where to watch this year's Oscar-nominated films
Find out where to watch 2012's Oscar-nominated films in London cinemas
10 unlikely badboy biopics
Featuring Phil Collins, Jeremy Clarkson, Nick Clegg, David Starkey and a host of other unlikely subjects
Interview: Sean Durkin on 'Martha Marcy May Marlene'
The first-time director of the brilliant new thriller discusses religious cults and robot boxing
Pop-up cinema for Valentine's Day
Side-step romantic clichés with some alternative Valentine’s viewing
What do you think?
Post your review now