6. The Army Of The Twelve Monkeys 12 Monkeys
In that strange way only Terry Gilliam can muster, 12 Monkeys was an awesome mix of confusing, surreal, clever and just balls-out trippy. It focused on a time-travelling Bruce Willis attempting to stop a virus in his time by assassinating present-day terror cell leader Brad Pitt, and it just got a whole lot weirder from there. When we first hear about Pitt's unit The Army Of The Twelve Monkeys they're set up to be all sorts of formidable. Ostensibly ran by a madman, any organisation which can doom the future must be a terrifying proposition, right? Well, wrong, actually. I guess the writing was on the wall when we first heard they were eco-terrorists. Of all the terrorism branches, eco-terrorism appears to be the least fertile for effective megalomania in films, and 12 Monkeys proves no exception. We learn that they aren't exactly the criminal masterminds we'd set them up to be. In fact, they're nothing of the sort their master plan isn't some sort of viral apocalypse, but breaking animals out of a zoo. I know a runaway tiger or two might be a terrifying prospect, but it sort of pales into insignificance compared to the original doomsday prophecy the film set up. Again, this is a good twist and really marks this film out as something different, if the Gilliam credit hadn't told you that already.