Terry Gilliam: Ranking His Films From Worst To Best

4. 12 Monkeys

Gilliam's films are often densely packed with ideas and it's perhaps no surprise that critics often lambast him for not being able to order them in a coherent fashion. These ideas and themes sometimes seem to freewheel around one another as if vying for supremacy, and nowhere is this perhaps more noticeable than in 12 Monkeys, his 1995 sci-fi dystopian time travel thriller. In the year 2035 the surface of the planet has long since been rendered uninhabitable by the outbreak of a virus in 1996 which killed all but 1% of the population. In order to determine the root cause of the apocalypse, the authorities send criminals back in time - one such prisoner is James Cole (Bruce Willis), who is accidentally sent back to 1990 and soon finds himself locked up in a mental asylum under the care of Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe). Here, he meets Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt) the deranged son of an eminent virologist (Christopher Plummer) - Jeffrey may or may not be the future leader of The Army of the 12 Monkeys, believed to be the cause of the deadly outbreak. After hopping back and forth through time, Cole finally lands in 1996 where he kidnaps Railly and forces her to help him save the world. The wonderful first act is a delirious exploration of sanity and madness, as Cole starts to question his own mind. Brad Pitt's performance as Goines is deserving of his Oscar nomination - all twitchy inflections and wild gesticulations - but Willis himself deserves praise for what is certainly a highlight of his career, in which brooding vulnerability sits at odds with outbursts of violent rage. As the plot moves forwards at a relentless pace, the folly of science, the need for environmental conservation and apocalyptic nightmares all converge in a story held together by the increasingly doomed love story centering around Cole and Railly. It is no coincidence that the cinema they hide out in at one point is screening Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, a film which also deals with the fractured nature of memory and identity. The final reel, which ramps up the tension, is similarly Hitchcockian in its structure. Almost too clever for its own good (the script by David Peoples - who wrote the screenplay for Blade Runner - and his wife is certainly crammed full of ideas), 12 Monkeys is one of the most cerebral mainstream science fiction movies to have come out of Hollywood.