The Jetty Revisited

Rating: 6/10 (1 April 2020)

"Twelve Monkeys" is about remembering. The time travel is an extension of this--revisiting the past, before most of humanity was wiped out by disease and the survivors imprisoned underground. As a remake of the 1962 short film "Le Jetée" (1962), there's also the memory of this past film. The twist in this revision from Terry Gilliam and company is the suggestion that remembrance, as viewed through the perspective of Bruce Willis's protagonist, may be mad and, thus, unreliable, which plays into the director's penchant for canted angles and otherwise strange camerawork and production design.
One setting in particular, besides the airport, plays well into the remembrance aspect of the scenario as the time traveler visits it in present and past. The asylum stands out, too, and helps question the reliability of the protagonist's perspective, with Brad Pitt, as another madman becoming the subject of obsession for Willis's character, providing an especially apt energetic and over-the-top performance. Meanwhile, the underground reminds one of Gilliam's prior "Brazil" (1895). And a WWI photograph recalls the reliance on still photography in "La Jetée," which are otherwise replaced in "Twelve Monkeys," along with viral pandemic instead of the threat of nuclear apocalypse, by erratic movement--actorly, cinematographically, along with the continued time shifts--within twisted spaces.