12 MONKEYS

OUT 15 october / cert 15 / 129 mins

Last month, Terry Gilliam was given indie film festival raindance’s annual ‘Auteur Award’. While accepting the accolade, the 77-year-old director pointed out the idea of him being an auteur was utter nonsense; everything he’d achieved was the result of collaboration. There’s no firmer proof of that than 1995’s time-travel psycho-thriller 12 Monkeys: a robust remake of a French sci-fi curio (La Jetée), adapted by David and Janet Peoples, made for a Hollywood studio (Universal) and starring Bruce Willis. In short, Gilliam was a director for hire (albeit with final cut). And yet it’s one of his best films — behind only Brazil and Time Bandits. While it’s impressively replete with Gilliamisms (retrofuturism, nightmare-dark comedy, quirky scoring), his wilder tendencies are necessarily restrained, giving the film a mainstream-friendly propulsion and clarity I’ve admittedly missed in some of his later films.