Synopsis:

A trimmer, less chaotic and tone down version of Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys.

Intentions:

With its shifts in tone and style as exemplified by Brad Pitt’s buggy loony-toon and Bruce Willis’s movingly bewildered introvert, Terry Gilliam’s apocalyptic fantasy “TWELVE MONKEYS” is even weirder than it sounds. Less a Terminator-type action movie than a spectacularly disorienting inaction movie, this is a movie that I should re-watch all the time, but don’t. It doesn’t reward repeated viewing. The film’s a terrible mess, but a terribly beautiful, tender mess. To be able to go with the very eccentric “TWELVE MONKEYS” one really needs to know up front that it is a film by a Monty Python member who had a big win with “The Fisher King” and before that, a big flop with “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.”And as a more specific frame of reference, it helps to know that Gilliam’s earlier directing efforts were the Orwellian sci-fi cult favorite “Brazil” and the dark time-travel comedy “Time Bandits.”If you have any familiarity with the latter two pictures, you may have some idea of just how weird and wonderful and bizarre and frustrating “TWELVE MONKEYS”” is. In terms of plot, we’re back in the time-travel territory of “Time Bandits,” while the film’s dark, dank, cluttered and visually arresting style owes more than a little to “Brazil.” Although he’s great at building worlds of his own, Gilliam was never one for a subtle fine touch. And this is were he starts losing me. His 1990 Baltimore asylum is a ward full of central casting “loonies” who stare catatonically ahead or speak of travel to fictional planets. It’s all wide angle distorted dutch-tilted shots while the actual “loony tunes” cartoon plays on the tv. When Cole falls in love with the fresh air of 1996 and goes bananas for Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World”, as that world looks headed for disaster, the irony is way over the top. Gilliam does not tell his story in a linear fashion, but instead jumps back and forth in time and offers occasional hints about where it will all end up. And thus there’s a lack of any real sense of suspense. As soon as Willis tells Stowe the fate of a little boy trapped in a well, I knew that would be the key to whether or not she believed his outlandish tale of the future. As soon as Willis’ dream is shown for the third or fourth time, I knew how the movie would end. The acting is good, and the visuals are sharp. But at two hours long, they should have just settled for six monkeys.

Change List:

Amount of time Cut/Added: the following are in fanedit order. Chronological re-assemble of the entire film. All of Cole’s memory/dreams flashforbackards are gone All the scenes in the future are gone, well mostly gone new opening scene Trimmed Dr Reilly’s presentation Trimmed Frank Gorshin. The Riddler is mostly gone. Trimmed policy station interrogation. Added new music cues from VERTIGO Trimmed asylum Trimmed Brad Pitt’s insane monologues Deleted the phone call Deleted Dr Goines kidnapping Deleted kid James Cole at the airport Rearranged airport chase new ending many more trims to remember New color treatment to entire film The film is reformatted to 2:35:01.

Additional Notes:

So the attempt with this fanedit is to reverse the chaos (demementomix?) and pick one of the shifting tones. Gone are all the Loony bits and we focus on the mystery of James Cole. He’s got no history, no pass and no records. Is he insane or does he really come from the future? We don’t know for sure because we straighten up the multi time shift hopping and tell the story with a single flashback. We also remove all the scenes in the future. The attempt is to shift the focus from Cole to Dr Reilly. This way we are never sure if Cole is telling the truth of if he indeed is insane. Hopefully this tone down version will make the film more accessible for repeated viewing.

Other Sources:

Special Thanks: