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Movies: 12 Monkeys
The following is a movie I've watched and reviewed. Contrary to popular belief, I'm not selling DVDs. This is not a list of movies that tell you "the truth about UFOs". Simply said, I like movies. Each review is as simple and non technical as possible.
By Michele Bugliaro Goggia - last modified: March 29, 2006 10:07 PM
Full title: Twelve Monkeys.
Year: 1995.
Director: Terry Gilliam.
Starring: Bruce Willis, Brad Pitt, Madeleine Stowe, Frederick Strother, Christopher Plummer, Frank Gorshin, Jon Seda, Lisa Gay Hamilton, David Morse, Simon Jones, Michael Chance.
Language: English.
Price: 6.99 €
Rating: 
Description: a lone time traveller from the year 2035 must solve a riddle that may save his people... but it may also take him to the brink of madness. After the world's population is devastated by a killer virus, survivors must live in dark underground communities. Cole "volunteers" to travel into the past to obtain a pure virus sample, thereby helping scientists develop a cure. Along the way, he crosses paths with a beautiful psychiatrist and a one-card-short-of-a-full-deck mental patient. But the race is on, as Cole searches for The Army of the 12 Monkeys, a radical group linked to the deadly disease.
Bruce Willis and Madeline Stowe star in this brilliant sci-fi masterpiece from Terry Gilliam. Brad Pitt gives us a very brilliant performance, I've been astonished. The movie is a "remake" of Chris Marker's La Jetée: I believe that this movie is better than a remake, that often disappoint me (see The Time Machine), it is a further development of the story. Twelve Monkeys stands as a good movie side by side with La Jetée. Time is a pattern of the movie. Cole makes a phone call and leaves a message in 1996, it is picked up in the future and "they" send someone. For Cole that someone appears only seconds after the phone call. The movie explores and deals with what the psychological effects of time-travel: not knowing what reality is actual reality. The place that the time-traveler comes from or goes to.
Furthermore, the film recognizes that things that have past cannot be altered and that the prevention of a cataclysmic event, in this case the release of said virus, cannot be stopped or changed. The storytelling is totally non-linear and instead opts to distort and bend the way the story is told, incorporating a bevy of different time sequences: flashbacks, dreams, memories, the present, the past, the future, and even a scene that is lifted out of Hitchcock's Vertigo. All serve to envelop the viewer into its disturbing cacophony of madness and futility.
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