Powerful, clever and downright brilliant. Cinema perfection.

Rating: 10/10 (6 August 2005)

Twelve Monkeys is the sort of film that not everybody has seen. You may of had the chance to see it sometime, but skipped it due to what you may have heard or read about the plot and such. Unfortunately, you've skipped something special; something very special indeed.
Time travel has been depicted in various ways throughout cinematic history. The classic time travel theories in Back to the Future for instance, of the clever portrayal in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Whenever we see time travel, it's being used to save something, stop something or change something so that the future can be restored and everything will be fine and dandy. Twelve Monkeys shows us a world in which time travel cannot change events, they have already happened (similar to the Harry Potter time travel, yes). Thus, the objective of our man Bruce Willis is not to change the past, but to merely collect information to bring back to the present.
Weeved together in a masterful way that only Gilliam could create, Twelve Monkeys gives us twist after twist, allowing us to progress along the path that the protagonist does at exactly the same rate; figuring out the story as we go. The performances are superb, especially from Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt. They allow us to feel involved as we are plunged into a bleak, dark world which is probably one of the most realistic I've ever seen in cinema.
I won't give any hints at all as to the plot; it's more enjoyable if you watch it without knowing anything at all. What I will say, is that Twelve Monkeys is one of the greatest movies out there. Watch it A.S.A.P, before something really bad happens and it's just too late...
(5/5)