Back to the future in so many ways. Back to the future in so far as we were finally back in a cinema, after four months of enforced abstinence. Back to the future in so far as there can have been few more apposite films to have watched on the occasion of returning to the cinema in these plague ridden times.
I am sure I’ve seen 12 Monkeys before, but then again, perhaps I never did. It’s a film that has entered the consciousness, alongside the lighter Brazil, as a definitive high concept extravaganza. The kind of filmmaking that can only be done with big budgets and the flair stroke megalomania of an auteur director. I was never a great fan of Monty Python, and the Pythons’ shtick. Gilliam took the very British surrealism and coated it with North American excess. The Pythons on the whole flirted on the safe side of madness: Gilliam, with his fascination with Quixote, pushed the madness towards a more dangerous, unhinged edge. The effects in 12 Monkeys are startling. Not least because the film opens with the announcement of a virus that will wipe out most of the human population. Knowing how plausible this scenario is only adds grist to the mill. Can Bruce save the world or is he mad? Will any of us emerge from our Covid dreaming sane on the other side?
Whilst the directorial chutzpah is on full display, alongside an enjoyably over-the-top performance from a callow Brad Pitt, the star of the show is the screenplay. Janet Peoples and David Webb Peoples) weave a virtuoso script, which creates the space for the film’s excesses and indulgences, without making them appear as excesses and indulgences, as they are knotted into the logic of the film’s premise. So 12 Monkeys jumps from the first world war to a dystopian future and somehow it all makes sense. Without this immaculate screenplay, the house of cards would have collapsed, but as it is the film holds up and retains tension right to the telegraphed finale.
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