12 Monkeys: Gilliam's Time-Loop of Despair

Thu, 11 Jul 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Terry Gilliam is not a director you associate with control. His films tend to burst their seams, run long, over-design every corner of the frame and dare the studio to rein them in. 12 Monkeys, from 1995, is the strange exception, the one time his baroque instincts served a structure so tight it functions like a trap snapping shut. That discipline came from an unusual source: the screenplay by David and Janet Peoples took its bones from Chris Marker’s 1962 La Jetée, a twenty-eight-minute French film told almost entirely in still photographs, about a man haunted by an image of a death he witnessed as a child. Marker’s short is one of the purest time-travel stories ever made, and Gilliam’s achievement is to inflate it to feature length without puncturing it.

La Jetee - vo.rs

12 Monkeys: Gilliam's Time-Loop of Despair