Dom Robinson reviews

Cat.no: 051 920 2

Cert: 15

Running time: 124 minutes

Year: 1995

Pressing: 1999

Region(s): 2 (UK PAL)

Chapters: 18 plus extras

Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1

Languages: English

Subtitles: English

Widescreen: 1.85:1

16:9-enhanced: No

Macrovision: Yes

Disc Format: DVD 9

Price: £17.99

Extras : Scene index, Featurette: "The Hamster Factor and other tales of the Twelve Monkeys".

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Director:

Terry Gilliam (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Brazil, Jabberwocky, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Time Bandits)

Producer:

Charles Roven

Screenplay:

David Peoples and Janet Peoples (inspired by the film "La Jetee" written by Chris Marker)

Music:

Paul Buckmaster

Cast:

James Cole: Bruce Willis (Armageddon, Blind Date, Color Of Night, Death Becomes Her, Die Hard 1-3, The Fifth Element, The Jackal, Last Boy Scout, Last Man Standing, Mercury Rising, Pulp Fiction, The Sixth Sense, Striking Distance)
Dr. Kathryn Railly: Madeleine Stowe (Bad Girls, Blink, The Last of the Mohicans, Short Cuts, Stakeout, The Two Jakes, Unlawful Entry)
Jeffrey Goines: Brad Pitt (Cool World, Johnny Suede, Kalifornia, Meet Joe Black, A River Runs Through It, Seven, Seven Years In Tibet, Sleepers, Thelma and Louise, True Romance)
Dr. Goines: Christopher Plummer (Aces High, Battle of Britain, Dolores Claiborne, The Return of the Pink Panther, Skeletons, The Sound of Music, Waterloo, Wolf, TV: The Thorn Birds)
Dr. Peters: David Morse (The Crossing Guard, Extreme Measures, The Good Son, The Indian Runner, The Long Kiss Goodnight, The Negotiator, The Rock, Stephen King's The Langoliers)

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The film begins with Cole as a child at the airport hearing a gunshot and seeing a long-haired man keel over, closely followed by a blonde woman screaming and running over to help him. Then we're back to the present as Cole wakes up, his job as a 'volunteer' to take samples on the surface of the planet for analysis.

Events take Cole back in time to April 12th, 1990, where he becomes a mental patient at Baltimore County Hospital, the doctors, including Dr. Kathryn Railly, played by Madeline Stowe, not understanding his ramblings about the world and its impending doom, although one of his fellow 'inmates' Jeffrey, played brilliantly by a psychotic Brad Pitt seems to appear in full agreement with him. After another chain of events, Cole is thrust forward to 1996 where he comes across Dr. Railly and Jeffrey again, and sees it as his destiny to find out what killed the planet's populaion, and just what the mysterious Army of the 12 Monkeys have to do with all of this. Can he succeed? In a typical Hollywood film you might say yes, but with director Terry Gilliam at the helm, nothing is typical, or predictable.

This film has so much going for it, that there's no way it can fail as superb entertainment, keeping Bruce Willis in the actor's A-list, and as he proved in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, he's an all-round actor who can apply himself to much more than a straight-forward action role.

Madeline Stowe serves adequately in the role as the good doctor, but Brad Pitt, in a role which earned him an Oscar nomination, is excellent as the psyched-out mental patient who helps Bruce Willis escape from the institution, only to be captured again...

And Brad Pitt had the cheek
to call everyone else crazy ?!?

While many early Universal releases were brought out with an anamorphic widescreen picture, during the times when they were still known as Polygram, this one hasn't. Zooming the picture in to fill a widescreen TV, it makes the picture look a little dull by comparison with what a good anamorphic release would look like.

The average bitrate is a fine 5.59Mb/s, occasionally peaking over 9Mb/s and the film is presented in its original widescreen ratio of 1.85:1, capturing all of Gilliam's inspired visuals. According to the back cover it indicates a "full frame" 4:3 version is also included on the disc but it isn't. Such claims made by Columbia TriStar's Stepmom led to that disc being recalled as it was emblazoned on the front, so how come the VPRC (Video Packaging Review Committee) missed it ?

The sound cannot be faulted though. Presented in Dolby Digital 5.1, the one thing you'll remember the most is the score from Paul Buckmaster, while the rest of it comes across perfectly for dialogue, ambience and the occasional light tune such as "Wonderful World, all drawing you into Cole's world and the madness that inhabits it.

Extras :

Chapters :

Bizarrely, the first chapter still shows a Polygram logo at the start with the last few seconds of the music that normally accompanies Universal's logo crashing in.

Languages & Subtitles :

Featurette :