12 Monkeys (Blu-ray) (1995)

"Bruce Willis is bruisingly good as the hero and Brad Pitt is suitably zany as the activist who dogs his trail.  David Sterritt, Christian Science Monitor
"Fierce and disturbing, with a plot that skillfully resists following any familiar course.  Janet Maslin, New York Times
"...a disturbing and dazzling lost world.  Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

Editor's Note When a man enters a hospital claiming to have journeyed back in time from the year 2025 to stop a killer virus from exterminating mankind, a beautiful psychologist decides he might be more than delusional. Terry Gilliam populates this labyrinthine, apocalyptic film with twisted characters and eerie revelations. The film was shot primarily in Philadelphia; Gilliam uses the more dilapidated area of the city to the film's apocalyptic advantage. The film is based on the 1962 French short film LA JETEE.

	Christopher Plummer
	Bruce Willis
	Brad Pitt
	Madeleine Stowe
	Jeffrey Beecroft - Production Designer
	Charles Roven - Producer
	Mick Audsley - Editor
	Robert Cavallo - Executive Producer
	Gary Levinsohn - Executive Producer
	Roger Pratt - Director of Photography
	Julie Weiss - Costume Designer
	Janet Peoples - Screenplay
	Paul Buckmaster - Composer
	Lloyd Phillips - Co-Producer
	Robert Kosberg - Executive Producer
	David Peoples - Screenplay
	Terry Gilliam - Director

In this intriguing science fiction film from director Terry Gilliam, penal colony prisoner James Cole must travel back in time from the year 2035 to find the cause of a virus that killed five billion people in 1997.| Cole's trip into the past won't be easy. For starters, he winds up in the wrong year on his first attempt. Once, as he time-travels, Cole ends up a prisoner in an insane asylum in 1990. There, he meets psychiatrist Kathryn Railly and inmate Jeffrey Goines, who could hold the key to the epidemic's spread. Cole later winds up in the middle of a World War I battlefield. | After meeting James for a second time, in another year, Dr. Railly gets further involved in his quest. Although she thinks at first that Cole must be crazy, Kathryn soon starts to believe him and attempts to help.| But James has already started to question his own sanity and tries to figure out if his journeys through time are real or if he's just been imagining everything. Premiere
"...Plenty of surrealistic fluorish..." 12/01/1995 p.36

Rolling Stone
"...Pitt is terrific....Solving the riddle of 12 MONKEYS is an exhilarating challenge..." 01/29/1996 p.64-66

USA Today
"...A Hitchcockian chase...A crowd-pleasing airport-pursuit pic..." -- 3 1/2 out of 4 stars 12/27/1995 p.1D

Entertainment Weekly
"...A near-fractal script,...[an] achingly battered performance [by Willis]...and its own pell-mell momentum....Emotional urgency..." -- Rating: B 07/12/1996 pp.64-5

Los Angeles Times
"...An unlikely love story combined with a visionary detective yarn....Mystifying, intriguing..." 12/27/1995 p.F1

ReelViews 9 of 10
Any film that enters the realm of time travel does so at its own peril. You need look no further than last year's disastrous Timecop to understand why. Even James Cameron's Terminator films treaded uncertainly through the minefield of paradoxes created by people venturing across the landscape of their own pasts. Thus, it's a refreshing to encounter a movie with a logical, intelligent approach to the dangers of zipping through time. While I won't claim that Twelve Monkeys has a decisive solution (how can anything be "decisive" when it's so firmly grounded in fantasy?), this approach makes sense, primarily because the time trippers here aren't trying to change the past (hence, wiping out reality), but are instead observing it to make a better future. - James Berardinelli

Chicago Sun-Times 8 of 10
Terry Gilliam's ambitious "12 Monkeys" was co-authored by David Peoples, who wrote "Blade Runner," and it has the same view of the near future as a grunge pit - a view it shares with Gilliam's own "Brazil." In this world, everything is rusty, subterranean, and leaks. The movie uses its future world as a home base and launching pad for the central story, which is set in 1990 and 1996, and is about a time traveler trying to save the world from a deadly plague...I've seen "12 Monkeys" described as a comedy. Any laughs that it inspires will be very hollow. It's more of a celebration of madness and doom, with a hero who tries to prevail against the chaos of his condition, and is inadequate. - Roger Ebert