Awesome Time Travel concept.

Rating: 9/10 (12 January 2004)

The Army of the Twelve Monkeys, with a psychotic leader (Pitt), is responsible for releasing a deadly virus into the human race resulting in the death of 5 billion people in the year 1996. A time traveler (Willis) from the year 2035 must go back into the past to collect the virus in it's pure form, before it mutates, and help return the human race to the surface of the earth, in the year 2035. The survivors have been forced to live underground to prevent from being infected and animals released by the Twelve Monkeys are now free to roam the surface once more.
Minor Spoiler Alert:
12 Monkeys, from the very creative Terry Gilliam, is one of the best, if not the best, time travel movie I've seen. It is produced with only one minor flaw (Stowe somehow remembers Willis) and is easily forgivable considering the rest of the film and the acting performances. Instead of going back into the past to change the future, the concept of this movie is to go back into the past to get information to help the future at it's present state, if that makes any sense. After all, if one were to go back in time to change something from happening, what would happen to the people that have their time altered? They wouldn't remember, or even be the same conscious being, so what would be the point of that? In a sense, it really wouldn't matter to them, not directly anyways. I've always had trouble with this in time travel films, and the reason I like this movie's plot so much is because it's premise is, `you cannot change something that has already happened.' Very clever, and less confusing. Unlike the Terminator movies, were they simply try to change the past altogether and prevent the future from ever happening.
The acting performances are quite convincing, particularly Brad Pitt's version of a schizo-psychotic crazy person with a lazy eye, and especially when they're in the asylum. He was brilliant in his role as the head of the Army of the Twelve Monkeys, Jeffrey Goines, and you begin to believe he's really crazy. Willis and Stowe do a great job as well.
Fans of Terry Gilliam can expect his usual dark industrial/apocalyptic vision of the future as seen in Brazil. And considering the behavior and nature of the human race, it isn't all that far fetched to the open mind. This is a must for Gilliam fans, pure and simple. 9/10