Subject: REVIEW: 12 MONKEYS

From: [email-masked] (John Robertson)
Date: 12 Jan 1996 17:31:43 GMT

12 MONKEYS
                       A film review by John Robertson
                        Copyright 1996 John Robertson

Directed by: Terry Gilliam
Starring: Bruce Willis, Madeline Stowe, Brad Pitt, Frank Gorshin, 
Michael Malone, David Morse, and Christopher Plummer.  

Perfect Person Rating*: The Perfect Person for this film is is a 
person with an appreciation for Terry Gilliam's sense of style, a 
lover of science fiction, and The Twilight Zone as well as the top 
three stars of the film.  The Perfect Person would probably give this 
film a 10 out of 10.  

Twelve Monkeys is a remake of the film La Jetee (1962), and although I 
have not seen the original, I think I understand what it is about, and 
have a new appreciation for it.  Twelve Monkeys has a plot that we 
have seen before, though not often in a Hollywood film.  

Bruce Willis plays a man from a horrible future, where mankind has 
almost been wiped out by a virus which ravaged the earth in 1996.  A 
convicted felon, he is volunteered to perform a mission in the not so 
distant past, to try and find the origin of the plague so scientists 
of his time can create a cure in their time.  

Willis' time travel is slightly off the mark, and he ends up arriving 
in 1991 instead of 1996, and to make matters worse, he assaults a 
policeman and finds himself in an insane asylum after babbling about 
his "mission" to find the Army of the Twelve Monkeys and stop a virus 
that will wipe out humanity in six years.  

Madeline Stowe is Willis' psychiatrist, and Brad Pitt is a fellow 
resident of the insane asylum.  After several days of treatment, 
followed by a return to the future and several trips back into several 
pasts, Willis, Stowe and Pitt's lives become intertwined in a web of 
causality, flashbacks and flash forwards, and questions about just who 
is insane and who isn't.  

All three main actors give surprising performances, particularly Pitt, 
who although not shy about taking non-leading man, non-beefcake roles 
in the past, plays a role that is something of a departure for him.  

Twelve Monkeys is a fine film and I recommend it highly to anyone who 
comes close to the Perfect Person profile above.  Although there are 
holes in the film, what time travel film is without them?  

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Copyright 1996 by John Robertson.  Retransmit freely if unedited.  My 
opinions are solely my own, and in no way reflect those of my 
employer.  

* Perfect Person Rating: The Perfect Person Rating is an attempt to 
give the reader a new way of understanding my rating.  Rather than 
give a film a score, either overall, or on several attributes, the 
Perfect Person Rating tries to identify the type of person would enjoy 
this movie the most.  Since a reviewer is by nature someone with a 
great deal of experience in what they are reviewing, their experience 
may not be the same as someone who is less informed, less jaded, or 
more attuned to the subject.  Hopefully the Perfect Person Rating will 
go further toward eliminating reviewer bias than a simple rating 
scale.  Comments are appreciated.