Nightmares sometimes scare us more when they have a wry undercurrent. In “12 Monkeys,” director Terry Gilliam — the Monty Python vet who channel-surfed through the centuries in “Time Bandits,” spun mind-boggling tales in “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” and plunged us into a great Mad Magazine nightmare in his masterpiece “Brazil” — is back in his explosive element. With seeming impudence and zest, he makes another whirling, carnival-like world of awesome fears and outrageous delights.
Imagination still formidable, eyes still sharp, Gilliam proves again what a master of dark, iconoclastic science fiction he is. “12 Monkeys” is a raging visual phantasmagoria, packed with gadgets, gimmicks and scathing jests. And Gilliam and his stars (Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt as two apparent lunatics and Madeleine Stowe as a psychiatrist) keep everything at high boil.
Yet, despite its silly sounding title, the movie is no barrel of fun. Though the pace and spirit here are comic in tone, the vision of “Monkeys” is as bleak as any American film has recently given us. The mood suggests Philip K. Dick and “Blade Runner”; the premise suggests “The Terminator.”
In “12 Monkeys,” Willis, like Arnold Schwarzenegger in “The Terminator” and “Terminator 2,” is a time traveler sent back to the present from a catastrophic future. But there are crucial differences. In the action-movie terrain of “The Terminator,” tomorrow’s world will eventually be ravaged by war. “12 Monkeys” extrapolates a deadly (non-AIDS) virus that by 2035 will drive mankind underground and leave Earth’s surface to the animals.
And Willis’ James Cole — rather than Big Arnold’s killer robot — is no destroyer, but a detective in spite of himself. He’s very human, alienated, plagued by bad dreams and unable to fit in anywhere.
How did the plague start? Nature? Accident? Human design? Cole — whom we first see naked, one prisoner among hundreds in a row of subterranean 21st Century cages — is sent back to scout 1996, the year the virus broke out. But so tacky and undependable is his time-machine that Cole misses by half a decade and winds up in 1990. There, with his wild tales of time travel, 5 billion dead and a deserted Earth, he is quickly incarcerated as a madman.
Is he mad? It’s part of the strategy of “12 Monkeys” — just as in Dick’s parallel-world novels — to keep us guessing. The “Monkeys’ ” psychiatrist, Kathryn Railly (played by Madeleine Stowe, who often seems twice as smart as the people around her), is intrigued by Cole.
Another patient seems even nuttier than Cole: Brad Pitt as goony Jeffrey Goines. Son of the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Leland Goines (Christopher Plummer), Jeffrey is an animal-rights activist clearly gone over the edge, even though his jabbering raps — presented by Pitt with burning gazes, taut smiles and spastic hand gestures — have a small flavor of private truth, the bent vision of a radical zealot.
“12 Monkeys” gives us what seems to be the world through a madman’s eyes, then switches us around by showing us that the fantasies might be real and the paranoia justified. The movie’s 2035 America is a junkyard underground fascist state. The cities of 1990 and 1996 (Philadelphia and Baltimore) are violent, rotting and collapsing. And Gilliam keeps trapping us between our hope that Willis’ beleaguered Cole will be proved sane and the terror that will engulf us if he is.
Meanwhile, as that plot spins out, Cole keeps having a recurring nightmare about a gundown in an airport, observed by a small boy. And when Cole escapes from his 1990 asylum and pops up again in 1996, he and Kathryn become a couple-on-the-run. The nightmare, Goineses and all, begins to assume rational form.
With its parallel time tracks and shifting realities, subterranean bunkers, high-tech widgets and crumbling cities, “12 Monkeys” is a movie so packed and hyperactive that watching it may wear you to a frazzle. But it’s a stimulating frazzle; if you follow the film closely, everything knits together.
David Peoples — who wrote Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven” and co-wrote “Blade Runner” (adapted from a Dick novel) — collaborated on this script with his wife, Janet. And they’ve gotten some of the feel of those two previous movies: A bitterly romantic, scary, relentless quality. But “12 Monkeys” has something more: truly dark humor, a giggly sense of impending doom and chaos.
“12 Monkeys” is credited as being inspired by Chris Marker’s 1962 “La Jetee,” a famous French science fiction short set after the apocalypse and composed almost exclusively of black-and-white stills. But it has a much different mood than that austere and lyrical film about another man sent back to investigate his own past.
“La Jetee” was a wistful, poetic, pacifist work. Gilliam, who deliberately didn’t watch that movie, hurls himself in “12 Monkeys” into his usual hectic hurly-burly and fiendishly complex clutter.
But there are allusions to another movie in “Monkeys.”
Alfred Hitchcock’s great romantic thriller “Vertigo” is watched by Cole and Railly, and it echoes their plight and desire. And, just as “Vertigo” failed in 1958 despite its star cast of James Stewart and Kim Novak, the presence here of Willis and Pitt — and even Stowe — may delude some audiences into thinking they’re in for a “Die Hard”-“Seven” horror-action ride. If they walk in expecting that kind of adrenaline fix, they’re in for a disappointment.
Willis’ Cole isn’t the blue-collar hero of his John McClane movies. Instead, he projects raw pain and savage alienation and bewilderment. And Pitt doesn’t bother with the dreamy drawl and James Dean-ish looks his fans seem to like. He gives a deliberately alienating performance, full of jerks, tics and a naive boyish enthusiasm that seems to have turned poisonous.
They’re both excellent. In the glare of their current superstardom, we may forget how good Pitt and Willis are, how adventurous they’ve both been in their recent choices of roles. Here, they seem rejuvenated, full of ideas. Along with Stowe and Plummer, they inject depth and danger into their scenes and fit right into the movie’s nightmare vision.
In “12 Monkeys,” mankind is conquered by slapstick malevolence — and also by disease and the perversion of idealism. Gilliam’s new movie is another dystopian fantasy of our world gone wildly wrong.
And there’s an irony in the fact that Gilliam made this movie back at Universal, the studio with which he waged a small war to release “Brazil” in 1985 (the studio wanted a happier ending). A decade later, “12 Monkeys,” for all its big stars and high-tech thrills, is more pessimistic: a movie that imagines both the end of our world and the death of love. Can we laugh at that? Can we cry? Can we shiver? “Monkeys,” at its best, catches us between all three.
”12 MONKEYS”
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Directed by Terry Gilliam; written by David and Janet Peoples; photographed by Roger Pratt; edited by Mick Audsley; production designed by Jeffrey Beecroft; music by Paul Buckmaster; produced by Charles Roven. A Universal release; opens Friday. Running time: 2:10. MPAA rating: PG-13. Language, sensuality, nudity, violence.
THE CAST
James Cole………………….Bruce Willis
Kathryn Railly……………Madeleine Stowe
Jeffrey Goines…………………Brad Pitt
Dr. Leland Goines……..Christopher Plummer
Dr. Fletcher……………….Frank Gorshin
Jose…………………………..Jon Seda
