Review of Twelve Monkeys (1995) by Dustin P — 03 Nov 2013

I first watched this when I was a teen and I hated it. As I got older, I felt that I should give it another chance because I probably didn't completely understand it at the time. After all, it has Bruce Willis AND Brad Pitt. How bad could it be?

After a second viewing, I don't hate it....as much. It's still an weird story that is told rather poorly. It has many odd camera choices. In one shot the camera starts out behind some plants and raises up to show a man giving a speech at a dinner party. At first I thought it was a POV shot of Bruce Willis' character, who had just snuck into the party. However, the camera raises up so high after peering through the plants, that it couldn't have been from his POV. Weird shots like this took me out of the film. Instead of enjoying the film, I had to stop and think "why did they do that with the camera?". The answer: for no good reason. I guess Terry Gilliam thought it would be "neat".

The biggest problem I have is with the ending. You sit through this 2+ hour film, then the ending happens, and all I could think was "Well, that was a complete waste of time". *SPOILER ALERT* Nothing is accomplished and he is shot dead while trying to kill the guy that actually caused the outbreak. All he manages to do is figure out that it's not the 12 Monkeys group that unleashed the disease. I guess it could be argued that this knowledge could help the future people change the past. However, that isn't shown and I think the point of the film is that you can't really change the past. My point is that it seemed like a huge waste of my time to watch over 2 hours of a time traveler trying to change the past only to watch him fail.

It'd be like if Back To The Future had Marty McFly go back in time and have no effect on the future. He comes back - his Dad is still a wimp doing Biff's bidding and Doc Brown is still shot dead at the mall. Then just to piss the audience off they have Marty killed by the Libyans as well. That's what this film was like.

It's not quite as bad as I remembered, but it was still bad.