j* movie reviews 2020

12 Monkeys (1995)

A pandemic special: nails a lot of the vibes and even the zoom meetings.

It's always hard to review a film you've seen before, let alone one that ranks super-highly in the favourite films phenomena. But having said I think 12 Monkeys is *the film* of the pandemic, I thought I should pony-up and do it. I was two young/poor to see this in cinema when it came out, but feel I found it quite soon after on video or tv and have loved it ever since. But this particular rewatch is for pandemic comparative purposes.

The first thing about this film is that for a pandemic movie it is intriguing because you don't see a single human die of the virus. This is because it's also a time travel movie, and the action takes place both pre-pandemic, in the beautiful world of 1997, and post-pandemic... some time in the deep future when the underground human survivors are desperately time-travelling to try and stop the virus. This is a little confusing, because ultimately they want pure samples of the virus, arguably to fight the virus in their own time... it's never really implied they intend to save the five billion who died, which was a death rate of about 85%. The virus never even gets dignified with a name.

So most of the film centres on James Cole (Bruce Willis) timehopping back and forth between the 90s and the future. At both ends of time he's interrogated, and at both ends he's stripped and scrubbed. Their is a very high quotient of man arse in this film, with Jeffrey (Brad Pitt) also baring the bum. In the 90s Cole's future-virus talk is taken as a bit mental, and his psychiatrist, Kathryn (Madeline Stowe) does her best to calm him down. But he keeps magically disappearing as the future calls him back.... And eventually she succumbs to his "delusion" and goes along for the ride.

It's quite fascinating as a time-travel story as it spends no time even attempting to explain it, it just lets it happen. The film itself is all focussed on the mental strain and fallout on the "volunteer" who does the travelling. It posits the confusion of time travel could never be seen as anything but a kind of intricate fantasy. We watch as Cole finds things in the past he's seen the photos of in the future, and collides with other time travellers on the same mission. Voices in his head, real or imagined leave both viewers and characters guessing as to how it all works.

But where it gets a little interesting in playing the time-honoured game of "have you made the past by visiting." Cole spends a lot of time with Jeffrey in the mental asylum and the interactions between these two have that epic tension - is Cole giving Jeffrey the idea to break into his virologist father's lab and let it out? Jeffrey is a dedicated animal activist, and they do believe the Earth is overrun with humans. Many of the current conspiracy theories get a look in, from the disbelief that germs are real to the concern of being sucked into phone lines, the imagined realities of lab-escapes and that the virus is all a part of a new world order of some kind.

Now there's been a lot of memey-criticism out there about why post-apocalyptic films have never predicted Zoom meetings, and there are a lot of reasons why not, depending on the type of apocalypse... I mean it's hard to zoome without electricity of the internet. But you'll be pleased to know that 12 Monkeys has done it on retro bubble screens. Whenever Jame Cole (Bruce Willis) returns to the future, the scientists interview him by this Zoom-strosity, presumably so they can maintain their social distance and minimise the chances he'll expose them to the virus.

Brad Pitt and Bruce Willis are both amazing in this. There feels like significant foreshadowing of roles they do after this... with Brucey literally using the "I see dead people" line even though it is four years before Sixth Sense. And Brad's kooky mental revolutionary is very much a prototype for Tyler Durden. There are other scenes here too that hint at a number of future films to come, with a vibe of Matrix agents or Dark City custodians pretty strong among many of the characters.

It's interesting that it doesn't feel like it's aged in terms of effects or storyline. With all it's affects being oldschool and practical, there's really nothing that dates the sci-fi edge of the grimey future. I tend to think if you told people it was a period film set in the 90s they'd believe it.

Anyway, for an intriguing pandemic film that remains delightfully sans pandemic, it's the best.

J* gives it 5 stars

(But has a long standing love affair with it.)