12 Monkeys Review

Although it isn’t even close to the brilliance of Brazil, 12 Monkeys is another example of the other side of Terry Gilliam. Early on, while watching every Gilliam film, I was frustrated with the fact that every movie he made seemed to try too hard to be another Python movie. Now, I think it’s safe to say that I am officially out of that period. Rather, 12 Monkeys has shown light to the other side of Gilliam, which, in a lot of ways I prefer. This new side of Gilliam, though, has a very strong trend in all of his movies. Every one of them has a strong relation to mental institutions. Fisher King, Brazil, and now 12 Monkeys, all have very strong references to mental illness. In a lot of ways, that first act of 12 Monkeys in the mental institution is probably it’s best. In those scenes, we start to recognize what kind of a character Bruce Willis is. On that note, I honestly haven’t ever been a huge fan of Bruce Willis. In 12 Monkeys, he’s mediocre at best. The real actor that shines in 12 Monkeys is Brad Pitt. He plays crazy incredibly well in the movie, personally, I think the performance was even Oscar-worthy. The next few beats in the story aren’t quite as good. For the majority of the second act, 12 Monkeys takes on the role of a demented road trip. After that, it’s mostly chaos. These final beats were fine, but I didn’t think they quite held up to my expectations from how good everything plays out at the beginning. 12 Monkeys is incredibly relevant in the middle of the pandemic as well. I feel that if I had watched this movie a couple years earlier, I’d be like “woah, crazy, unbelievable, science fiction stuff.” But, right now, a man coming back to the past seems like an average Tuesday afternoon. As for the time travel, often, time travel is handled quite well. However, I have never been bothered by time travel plot holes throughout my movie watching time. The only thing I found lacking with time travel, and with the rest of the movie, is the visual style. Gilliam has always been able to illustrate the strangeness of everything, however, it seems as if he didn’t fully utilize that in 12 Monkeys. In fact, the visual style was really just bland, sometimes even unappealing, but that was far from often. Still, the movie offers a mystery that is compelling and unique enough to have a good time. 7.6/10