L'Armée des 12 singes

"Twelve monkeys"'s got all the elements to become Terry Gilliam's masterpiece. An outstanding screenplay, a sustained rhythm, clever sometimes ironic dialogs. Moreover, he had a good nose about the cast. "Twelve monkeys" is also the first movie where Bruce Willis stands back from the kind of character he used to play in his previous movies. Here, a jaded and hopeless character which you could nickname a prisoner took over from a fearless and invincible hero (as it was the case in "Die hard"). No matter how he tries, he's a prisoner of the time. The movie contains a very thrilling end too. It's got a real dramatic power. But this terrific movie is also a reflection about man, the dangers he dreads (notably, the ones that could cause the end of the world and here, these are virus that can create illnesses). No matter how long it will take, "twelve monkeys" will be estimated at its true value: one of the masterpieces made in the nineties.

I don't know why his name is not under credits, but Pitt has done one of the best acts ever, of his career. No wonder he was nominated an Oscar for this. For all his amazing looks, he puts too much hard work in his roles. I never thought if that crazy guy role for a slim, good looking, stubbled stud will ever work. But he proved these amazing guys too can be crazy, that too beautifully.

Bruce was good as usual, may be too much drooling in his role and for his psychiatrist. Even for that personality he easily managed to overpower those two guys in the theater (kinda Die Hard thing). That scene was funny as hell.

Time travels, I think, if are that frequent, can never be right on the money. Ending up in the trenches as result is never a good idea. Can't they transport the person with his clothes on. I mean I will never wish to be teleported to some place naked, at-least factor in the weather for God's sake.

We have witnessed Corona recently and 2035 is a bit far away. Doesn't portend well for the human race.

Overall a good watch #TwelveMonkeys1995 - 8/10.

Twelve Monkeys is typically Terry Gilliam, loaded with the director's trademark quirky visuals, and, as such, should get right up my nose (I'm not a huge fan of his hallucinatory, surreal style, to say the least). And yet I still love this unusual time travel tale: it's got great performances, with a particularly strong turn from the then up-and-coming Brad Pitt, and Gilliam's chaotic storytelling actually suits the inherent madness of the whole movie. The twisty-turny plot keeps the viewer on their toes throughout, and Gilliam pulls all the threads together neatly for the finale. The occasional moment of visual excess still niggles (the steampunk/trash-heap aesthetic of the future isn't my cup of tea), but on the whole this is definitely one of the director's best films.

Bruce Willis stars as James Cole, a convict from the future who is sent to the past to try and discover the origins of the virus that wiped out most of the world's human population. After a violent altercation with the police of 1990, Cole is sent to an asylum where he meets patient Jeffrey Goines (Pitt), son of a wealthy scientist (played by Christopher Plummer), and quite possibly plants the seeds of mankind's destruction in the lunatic's mind. Together with his psychiatrist Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe), Cole tries to prevent the disaster from occurring.

At times, it seems as though Gilliam has only the slightest command of proceedings, and the film demands that the viewer puts in 100% concentration to avoid becoming as lost and confused as Cole himself, who becomes more and more unsure about what is reality and what isn't as the film progresses. Characters ramble, often seemingly incoherently, but what they are saying is, for the most part, intrinsic to the outcome, so pay attention (or have your finger on the rewind button). Those who make the effort will be rewarded by a film that is constantly inventive and frequently clever, and worth at least a few viewings to appreciate it to the fullest.

Normally I try to avoid Sci-Fi movies as much as I can, because this just isn't a genre that really appeals to me. Light sabers, UFO's, aliens, time traveling... most of the time it's nothing for me. However, there is one movie in the genre that I'll always give a place in my list of top movies and that's this "Twelve Monkeys" I remember to be completely blown away by it the first time, but even now, after having it seen several times already, I'm still one of its biggest fans. Every time I see it, this movie seems to get better and better.

Somewhere in the distant future all people live underground because an unknown and lethal virus wiped out five billion people in 1996, leaving only 1 percent of the population alive. James Cole is one of them. He's a prisoner who lives in a small cage and who is chosen as a 'volunteer' to be sent back to in time to gather information about the origin of the epidemic. They believe it was spread by a mysterious group called 'The Twelve Monkeys' and need the virus before it mutated, so that scientists can study it. But their time traveling machine doesn't work perfectly yet and he is accidentally sent to 1990, where he meets Dr. Kathryn Railly, a psychiatrist, and Jeffrey Goines, the insane son of a famous scientist and virus expert...

What I like so much about this movie is the fact that it is never clear whether all what you are seeing is real or not. Is this just an illusion, created in the mind of a mentally ill man or is it real? Does he really come from the future and can he really travel through time? Was the population really wiped out by a virus, released by the army of The Twelve Monkeys? Those are all questions that will leave you wondering from the beginning until the end. If the makers of this movie had chosen to make it all more obvious, I'm sure that I would never have liked it as much as I did now. It's just that mysteriousness that keeps me interested time after time. But that's not the only good thing about this movie of course. The acting is amazing too. Normally I'm not too much a fan of Bruce Willis, but what he did in this movie was just astonishing. Together with Madeleine Stowe and Brad Pitt he should have won several awards for it, because together with the amazing story, they made this movie work so incredibly well.

Even after several viewings, I'm still a huge fan of this movie. Except for this movie, I have only seen one other Terry Gilliam movie and that's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", which wasn't bad, but didn't really convince me either. However, it's this movie that really makes me look forward to his other work. I give it a 9/10, maybe even a 9.5/10.

There is a story (possibly apocryphal) about an exchange between Bruce Willis and Terry Gilliam at the start of Twelve Monkeys. Gilliam (allegedly) produced a long list (think about the aircraft one from the Fifth Element) and handed it to Butch Bruce. It was entitled "Things Bruce Willis Does When He Acts". It ended with a simple message saying: "please don't do any of the above in my movie".

There is a fact about this movie (definitely true). Gilliam didn't have a hand in the writing.

I would contend that these two factors played a huge role in creating the extraordinary (if not commercial) success that is The Twelve Monkeys.

Visually, the Twelve Monkeys is all that we have rightly come to expect from a Gilliam film. It is also full of Gilliamesque surrealism and general (but magnificent) strangeness. Gilliam delights in wrong-footing his audience. Although the ending of the Twelve Monkeys will surprise no one who has sat through the first real, Gilliam borrows heavily from Kafka in the clockwork, bureaucratic relentless movement of the characters towards their fate. It is this journey, and the character developments they undergo, which unsettles.

I love Gilliam films (Brazil, in particular). But they do all tend to suffer from the same weakness. He seems to have so many ideas, and so much enthusiasm, that his films almost invariably end up as a tangled mess (Brazil, in particular). I still maintain that Brazil is Gilliam's tour de force, but there's no denying that The Twelve Monkey's is a breath of fresh air in the tight-plotting department. Style, substance and form seem to merge in a way not usually seen from the ex-Python.

Whatever the truth of the rumour above, Gilliam also manages to get a first rate (and very atypical) performance out of the bald one. Bruce is excellent in this film, as are all the cast, particularly a suitably bonkers - and very scary - Brad Pitt.

It's been over a decade since this film was released. When I watched it again, I realised that it hadn't really aged. I had changed, of course. And this made me look at the film with fresh eyes. This seems to me to be a fitting tribute to a film that, partly at least, is about reflections in mirrors, altered perspectives and the absurd one-way journey through time that we all make. A first rate film. 8/10.