Another of the movies that I had the chance to record during one of the free preview weekends is 12 Monkeys. It's going to be on again, tomorrow at 3:30 AM on HBO, or three hours later if you only have the west coast feed. So I decided to watch it to do a review here.
Bruce Willis plays James Cole, a prisoner in some sort of dystopian future where a virus has killed over 90% of the earth's human population and everybody else lives underground. James has dreams about a young boy watching somebody get shot on an airport concourse, highly reminiscent of La jetée; the opening credits quite explicitly state that the movie was inspired by La jetée.
Cole is "volunteered" to go above ground to try to find some insects to see if they still carry the virus so the scientists can do more research. After returning, the scientists give him an offer: Go back to 1996, just before the virus was released, and see if he can find out about the virus and the mysterious group called the "Army of the 12 Monkeys" that may have released the virus.
However, Cole finds that he's arrived not in 1996, but in 1990, which is six years too early. His arrival gets him in trouble with the 1990 authorities, and after assaulting some police officers, he gets sent to an insane asylum in Baltimore. There he meets Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt), the son of a Nobel Prize-winning scientist (Christopher Plummer). Treating Cole is psychiatrist Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe).
Cole escapes and, on being recaptured, asks to make one phone call, because the people from the future are monitoring that phone number. Needless to say, the woman who answers has no idea what Cole is talking about. Somehow, however, this is enough for the scientists from the future to find Cole and bring him back.
They try to send Cole to 1996 again, but he gets sent first to World War I before ultimately winding up in 1996. Dr. Railly has now written a book and is giving a lecture on it. Cole accosts her when she comes out from the lecture, forcing her to drive him to Philadelphia, since that's where the animal rights group that's believed to have engendered the Army of the 12 Monkeys was based. Also, it's where Jeffrey Goines' father lives.
Dr. Railly begins to believe Cole, especially after she extracts a bullet from him and it happens to be one that he took in World War I as determined by metallurgical analysis. Cole, for his part, decides that he wants to stay in 1996 and not go back to what would be the post-apocalyptic present for him.
To Cole, this means that he wants to stop the virus from being released in the first place, which was not why the scientists sent him, since they believed that would be futile and however the timeline changed, the virus would still get released. Jeff has been released from prison and is supposedly doing research under his father, although it's a front for that animal rights group. Jeff is charismatic, but still pretty clearly nuts.
Eventually, we get to the time the virus was scheduled to have been released. But will Cole be able to stop whoever is going to release it? After all, the scientists were able to get him out of 1990 and out of World War I, so they should be able to find him in this timeline too....
12 Monkeys is a movie that is complicated and requires the paying of close attention so you won't miss what's going on as things relate to events shown previously in the movie. If you've seen La jetée, you might be able to guess where 12 Monkeys is going, but it still does a pretty darn good job getting there.
Bruce Willis isn't necessarily my idea of the world's greatest actor, but director Terry Gilliam does a good job of playing to Willis' strengths as an action movie star by keeping the focus more on action and suspense than a serious drama. Pitt seems to me to be a bit over the top as an insane man, a stark contrast to the more catatonic mentally ill who are in the asylum in the opening scenes. But I'd assume that was a deliberate decision on the writers and directors, since he also has to be charismatic leading the animal rights group.
As I was watching, I of course couldn't help but think of current events with the coronavirus, and wondering whether the sort of virus released in 12 Monkeys could really be that deadly. After all, we've seen other viruses like Ebola (in Outbreak, which came out around the same time as 12 Monkeys) which is more fatal but also harder to transmit since the afflicted die so quickly, so the outbreaks die out. Still, we've seen in the past eight months just how easy it is to induce mass panic. We're not going to wind up living underground like in 12 Monkeys, but the authorities still seem intent on creating as much dystopia as possible. 25 years ago when 12 Monkeys was released, I don't think anybody would have expected it.
12 Monkeys has received a DVD and Blu-ray release. Apparently, there was a TV series adaptation several years ago, and that's on DVD too, so watch out if you're looking to buy this one.
No comments:
Post a Comment