• Reviews

• All
• Music
• DVDs
• Live
• Cinema
• TV
• Books
• Comic Books
• Video Games

Jan 18, 2015 By Cody Ray Shafer Web Exclusive

12 Monkeys, based on the film of the same name, is a puzzling time travel mystery thriller. At least, it was under the creative genius of filmmaker Terry Gilliam, inspired by a short film La Jetée by French artist Chris Marker. Somehow, Syfy managed to update a 20-year-old film and actually not bring any improvements to the style or story. It didn’t have to be better than the original, but is should at least be as interesting. Gilliam’s film was visually striking and unforgettable. Syfy’s version is exactly the opposite—visually uninspired and flat.

12 Monkeys takes place in a dystopian future wiped clean of 7 billion people by a catastrophic plague. Aaron Stanford (X-Men: Last Stand, The Hills Have Eyes) plays Cole, a man sent back in time to find information on “The Army of the 12 Monkeys,” a clue that could perhaps prevent the plague that wiped out humanity. He enlists the help of Cassandra Reilly (Amanda Schull), who is indirectly responsible for sending Cole on his mission in the first place. His first target is Leland Frost (Zeljko Ivanek), who supposedly developed the deadly virus as a biological weapon.

The TV series aims to differ from the film by reducing Cole’s complex chronological adventures to a mission of the week format, sending him back each time with a new goal that will unravel the larger mystery. The problem is that this construction undermines the original brilliance of the story and its themes of futility. 12 Monkeys, the series, never even addresses the elephant of a grandfather paradox in the room—at least not in the first two episodes—and changes the rules of the film’s time travel to a more formulaic Back to the Future set of physics, which doesn’t actually make logical sense. The beauty of Gilliam’s film was the inevitability of the future, as the heroes discover their fate is inescapable and any attempt at altering the past is only a small part of the chain that created the present in the first place. The series immediately proves this premise is no longer at work, and the past is suddenly malleable. This removes all the stakes, but also downgrades 12 Monkeys from fatalistic sci-fi dystopia to a predictable genre piece. Not horrible by SyFy, or even cable thriller standards, but still disappointing. (www.syfy.com/12monkeys)

Author rating: 4.5/10