How '12 Monkeys' Predicted Our Post-Apocalyptic Anxieties
Thanks to successes as varied as Teen Wolf and Fargo, television networks are producing an ever-increasing number of big-screen-to-small-screen projects. The latest of these projects lands today, with the debut on Friday of Syfy’s 12 Monkeys, an adaptation of the 1995 Terry Gilliam film of the same name (you can read Yahoo’s review of the show here).
It’s an intriguing endeavor, as the source material isn’t the most obvious one: The original 12 Monkeys was a well-received box-office hit (taking $160 million worldwide), yet it’s often overlooked in favor of bigger science-fiction fare of the period —dim, derivative films like Timecop, Star Trek: Generations, and Johnny Mnemonic. But looking back at the original, it’s clear not just why the show’s creators would find inspiration here, but also how influential the movie has proven over the past two decades, and what big shoes the TV version has to fill.
Those up in arms about another movie-to-television transition should be pacified by the reminder that 12 Monkeys was itself a remake of sorts: It was inspired by Chris Marker’s film La Jetée: an avant-garde 1962 black-and-white short about a man sent back (and forward) in time to try and prevent World War III (you can watch the film on Hulu). For a long time, La Jetée remained an arthouse curio, but it’s grown in reputation over time; in the renowned Sight & Sound poll of critics in 2012, it was named the fiftieth greatest film ever made.
One of the reasons Marker’s version has better known over time is because of 12 Monkeys, which was scripted by Blade Runner writer David Peoples and his wife, Jane, and directed by Terry Gilliam — an unusual choice, given that he’s clashed very publicly with the studio, Universal, on his film Brazil. In the unvarnished documentary The Hamster Factor, a behind-the-scenes account of the making of the film, Gilliam doesn’t hide that he’s essentially a director-for-hire, semi-derisively describing it as his “7 1/2th feature film.” But the uneasy dichotomy between the film’s studio origins, and Gilliam’s auteurish instincts are part of what make it so impressive.
The film opens with an abrasive (and very Gilliam-esque) first reel, as Willis’ James Cole — a haunted prisoner in a barren post-apocalyptic world — is sent back in time to the early 1990s with a two-part mission: 1) collect a sample of the virus that decimated the planet; 2) collect information about the Army of the Twelve Monkeys, a terrorist group said to have been responsible for spreading the virus. Things don’t go to plan, and Cole ends up in a mental asylum, meeting both unstable patient Jeffrey Goines (Pitt), an animal rights activist and the leader of the Army, and sympathetic psychiatrist Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe). Steadily, he starts to doubt his own sanity: Was he hallucinating his life in the far-future?
Combining the smart, tight, mainstream screenplay with the director’s often unruly vision creates one of Gilliam’s most satisfying pictures: Rich, darkly funny, imaginative, pleasingly ambiguous and agreeably off-kilter, even if the director’s trademark wonky visual style, full of uneven camera angles and distorted lenses, hasn’t aged as well as the whole. And while it’s not unusual for a big studio to back an offbeat filmmaker nowadays, in the mid-‘90s, a movie like 12 Monkeys was an oddity: A handsomely-budgeted, starry science-fiction picture with no real action sequences or CGI, some loopy performances — including Pitt’s twitchy, vanity-free turn — and a first act that takes place largely in a mental asylum.
It’s the film’s influence, though, that’s most striking on a rewatch. The mid-1990s were a relatively optimistic time: Nuclear paranoia had waned thanks to the end of the Cold War, the economy was on the upswing, and the scandal of the Lewinsky era was still a few years away. People were aware of mega-viruses like Ebola, thanks in part to Richard Preston’s non-fiction best-seller The Hot Zone, released the same year, but it seemed like a far-off, distant possibility to most.
12 Monkeys brought that fear home, with its vision of a deserted, wintry Philadelphia populated only by wild animals, a far cry from the endless deserts of nuclear-apocalypse films like Mad Max. It was one of the first films to play into the end-of-the-millennium fears that soon became a recurrent theme in the movies, and its vision of a terrible (and terribly realistic) future paved the way for everything from 28 Days Later and The Road, to The Walking Dead and Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes. The latter blockbuster franchise in particular seems to borrow as much from Gilliam’s film as it does from the 60s Apes movies and their nuclear disasters — witness the animal-testing sub-plot, and the subsequent viral epidemic, in the first film, or the memorable images of animals roaming a deserted city in last year’s Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes.
Furthermore, along with other near-contemporaries like Strange Days, Cube, Dark City and Pi, Gilliam’s chilly sci-fi flick gave audiences a taste for inexpensive, idea-driven science-fiction with a gritty lo-fi aesthetic. It was a micro-movement that, nearly a decade later, would influence present-day low-budget genre pictures like Another Earth, Primer and Coherence. It’s no coincidence that when Rian Johnson needed to send someone back in time in his own ingenious sci-fi movie Looper, he cast Willis.
It’s too early to say if Syfy’s 12 Monkeys lives up to its predecessor, but we suspect it’s unlikely that it’ll develop the cult, or the influence, of the original undervalued gem. And if it turns out to be truly awful, we’re sure Mr. Gilliam’s already working on a way to send Willis back in time once again to prevent it from ever happening…
