Consistent time travel!

Rating: 10/10 (13 February 2000)

Consistent AND clever. All too often a writer or film-maker will make it over the first hurdle only to crash into the second. But consistency in a time travel story is rare enough, and I remember the delighted purring made by people I knew who saw the film and found that it didn't take them for fools.
I haven't seen `La Jetée', so I can't say how much brilliance `Twelve Monkeys' owes to the earlier, shorter work. There are conflicting accounts. Presumably Gilliam's version adds SOMETHING to the tale. It's much longer, and none of the time is wasted.
If you've heard that this is the story of a time traveller who reports that he comes from the future and is locked away in an asylum as a result, and if this makes you sigh wearily and reach for something else - I know exactly how you feel. But you've got it all wrong. The action does NOT get bogged down in the loony bin; the story is NOT your standard `I'm sane, I tell you - saaane!' chestnut; indeed, the film cracks the chestnut to give a satisfying surprise to everyone like me who hates that sort of thing.
Don't be put off, either, if you're one of those people who finds Gilliam's visual ticks (beneath-the-nostrils close-ups, stupid tilting camera) irritating. Again, I do too, but there aren't so many of them in `Twelve Monkeys'; and anyway, they aren't a problem. The film looks great. Visual imagination lifts rather than detracts from the story. And it really is such a neat story.
There's more to praise but other writers can handle that. If there's a better science fiction film from the 1990s I've yet to see it - which isn't saying THAT much, since there's a fair few I haven't seen; but it's saying something.