Sci-fi `12 Monkeys' sparks frantic fears
If the predictions made in Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys are correct, then humanity doesn't have much time left. In the last months of 1996, according to James Kohl (Bruce Willis), a lethal virus will wipe out 5 billion people.
Of course, no one in the film believes what a mental patient like James Kohl has to say about himself and the future. But would you believe it if a man claimed to be from the future and kept making dire predictions about the fate of mankind and insisted that no, he is not insane? Such a man would be locked away in a padded cell with the key thrown away. This is an example of the "Cassandra syndrome" theme that prevails throughout the film: a curse of being able to predict the future, but always being disbelieved.
While the not-so-farfetched premise in these days of HIV and Ebola may sound just like another take on The Andromeda Strain or The Stand , its plot has different elements to it and proceeds at a pace that sets this movie apart from "deadly disease" flicks. But this movie is certainly not unprecedented: 12 Monkeys is loosely based on a 1963 French film called La Jetée.
Not only does the film confront apocalyptic issues, it also deals with that timeless science-fiction movie dilemma: time travel. Can time travel change the future? Are there parallel realities? Can someone from the future start an apocalypse by telling its instigator -- in the past -- about how the coming pestilence was unleashed?
Willis excellently expresses the confusion Kohl feels as a man struggling with the bleak, subterranean future he came from and the beautiful and (comparatively) fresh air of America in the mid-1990s. Naturally, Kohl favors and savors terra firma .
This movie's biggest and most pleasant surprise was undoubtedly Brad Pitt as the psychotic Jeffrey Goines, the son of a wealthy, eminent virologist. The über -stud, having camouflaged his famous baby blues with brown contact lenses, proves that he can act, in a role that is a far cry from Tristan Ludlow in Legends of the Fall . Even Pitt's hands turn in a remarkable performance ... they twist in obscene, jerky anger as if they have their own case of Tourette's syndrome, as if conducting an orchestra of 12 speed-freak monkeys.
The Army of the 12 Monkeys itself figures prominently in the plot, too. The army, led by Goines, is a group of vegetarian, animal-activist commandos with an agenda. Much of the film's plot centers around Kohl's pursuit of the army, and his trying to discover where the virus originated.
Madeleine Stowe, as sympathetic, insightful psychiatrist and writer Katherine Railly, delivers an impassioned performance, making the best of her role as a kidnapped woman who falls for her abductor.
If you haven't seen 12 Monkeys yet, you're missing out. Science fiction it is, but it's effective precisely because it is chillingly almost possible.
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