TWELVE MONKEYS
An Ambitious and amazing feature-length re-imagining of the classic short subject "La Jetee."
Reviewed by Steve Biodrowski
This is feature-length remake of LA JETEE, the short-subject masterpiece by Chris Marker that portrayed time travel as a kind of moebius strips folding back on itself. The original short was a remarkable piece of filmmaking with a style inextricably linked to its content. Perhaps LA JETEE’s auteur, Christ Marker, was simply using techniques from his documentary background (the story is told in a series of still frames, with a voice-over narrating the events); however, those frozen moments of time cannot help but enhance a story about the nature of time and returning to specific moments over and over again.
In retrospect, there was never any chance that 12 MONKEYS would turn out to be a literal remake; instead, it is a re-imagining of the basic premise, dramatized in conventional dramatic terms. Needless to say, director Terry Gilliam films his actors at twenty-four frames per second, not in still photographs. Nevertheless, 12 MONKEYS is not simply a Hollywood mainstreaming of a European art film. In fact, this independently financed effort was probably the most difficult and challenging film released by a major studio (Universal Pictures) in 1995.
The new script (working from a script by David Web Peoples and Lisa Peoples) retains and even amplifies the ambiguity of whether its protagonist, Cole (Bruce Willis) is in fact from the future, expanding the plot to feature length by including new material involving a psychiatrist (Madeline Stowe) trying to convince him that he is delusional. The story is intentionally told from these two contrasting viewpoints, thus distancing us from Cole: instead of sharing his subjective experience of being “mentally divergent” (i.e., existing in two separate times), we often see him as a deluded and possibly dangerous madman.
Also, his quest is not to prevent the plague (“How can I prevent what already happened?” he asks, having come from the post-plague future) but to secure an un-mutated sample of the virus that depopulates the planet, in the hope of scientists from his era can use it to save future generations. This lends an air of fatality to the proceedings, which (in a scene presented in a theatre showing a Hitchcock double bill of VERTIGO and THE BIRDS) are compared to reaching an old film: the vents witnessed do not change; they simply seem different because the viewer has changed.
The result is a strangely elegiac doomsday scenario, haunting and hopeless, yet somehow beautiful. Gilliam brings his patented dense visual texture to the futuristic underworld, and contrasts it with a few vivid images of the planet’s surface, no longer populated by humanity (no great loss, in the film’s scheme of things).
However, these sequences are but a fraction of the film, which deals mostly with Cole’s quest in the 1990s. Location shooting in Baltimore and Philadelphia conveys a world stricken with entropy even before by decimated by an artificially engineered biological plague. It’s an entropy that infects not just architecture or physical health but mental outlook as well. The world is already crumbling, because we no longer know how to create meaning. Ultimately, the question of whether Cole is a time traveler or a madman is resolved—but abandoned. He may be telling the truth, but that doesn’t help bring any greater understanding when the experience of reality has broken down past the point of creating order out of chaos. In the most telling scene, Stowe’s Dr. Railly laments that psychiatry is the new religion, telling us what’s real and what’s not, and she has lost her faith. Authority figures like her boss (played by Frank Gorshin) betray curious personality ticks hinting that they too are on the edge of madness, while seemingly sane scientists like Dr. Goines (Christopher Plummer) create deadly biological weapons in the laboratory that are only a security measure away from being unleashed upon an unsuspecting world.
The only people left who believe anything with conviction are the crazy ones, like the doctor’s son, Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt, in an Oscar-nominated performance), leader of the self-styled Army of Twelve Monkeys, a fringe group of suspected eco-terrorists, whose grand gesture of civil disobedience is releasing incarcerated animals from a zoo. Goines’ raving diatribes provide a clever way for the screenwriters to take swipes at modern, dehumanizing consumer culture without sounding like ham-handed preachers; after all, they put their message into the mouth of a madman, so you cannot object if it sounds strident and heavy-handed.
Pitt’s presence serves as s useful link to SEVEN, 1995’s other dark and twist view of a world gone mad. If that grim thriller was about the breakdown of “meta-narratives” (as the late film critic Patricia Moir observed in Cinefantastique magazine) to the point where a serial killer could use the Seven Deadly Sins as a model for a bloody work of art meant to shock the conscience of the modern world, then 12 MONKEYS portrays a world in which methods of understanding have atrophied to the point where a lone man can justify unleashing a plague that will destroy humanity. In this case, it is not the meek who will inherit the Earth; it is the animals we leave behind.
Copyright 1995 by Steve Biodrowski. This review originally appeared in the February 1996 issue of Cinefantastique magazine. You cand find an extended version of this review, including details about the DVD, at Cinefantastique Online.
