All the cool people like Terry Gilliam movies.
They know about the complex and disturbed realities he constructs with rampant visual inventiveness.
They loved 12 Monkeys.
They loved the bizarre floating globes of video screens, the prison of stacked cages and the scientists with crazy glasses and see-through raincoats in charge of a nightmarish clutch of time travel machines.
And 12 Monkeys had Bruce Willis being excellent and Brad Pitt early in his career showing how good he can be.
The film told the story of a deadly virus that wiped out most of humanity in the 1990s, forcing survivors to live underground.
Willis played Cole, a prisoner who ''volunteered'' in 2027 to be sent back through time to collect information on the Army of the Twelve Monkeys, thought to have started the plague, so it could be stopped before it began.
From Thursday, February 19, Sky's Zone sci-fi channel is running a new series of the same name, after American cable network Syfy dug back 20 years to find the 1995 film and develop it into a series.
There is a question to ask here: why?
But then the same question could be asked of the Fargo TV series, which took the Coen Brothers movie and developed it for television with a changed story.
The question became irrelevant, because the TV Fargo, with Billy Bob Thornton and Martin Freeman, was brilliant.
How does the TV 12 Monkeys fare?
The show launches breathlessly into the story.
Cole (Aaron Stanford, X-Men: The Last Stand) as in the original, is thrown back in time by mad scientists from a hideous future.
Unlike the movie, plot elements such as kidnapping a doctor and convincing her he is from the future, not mad, come in the first couple of minutes.
It makes for an easier understanding of what's up, which Terry Gilliam fed to his viewers slowly as his movie stumbled along like a glorious bad dream.
This is TV, however, and as such, Cole is young and attractive and well dressed, compared with movie Cole, who wore ill-fitted clothing, often sported open wounds on his head, and had bar codes tattooed on his neck.
The movie Cole was also unsure if he was, in fact, insane, while TV Cole is more like a soldier from the future, despite a criminal background.
Unlike Fargo, TV 12 Monkeys sticks to the plot.
That doesn't add much, and the show (in the first two episodes at least) does not reach the heights (and they were very high heights) of the original.
Maybe try it if you haven't seen the original, but are keen on dark, dystopian sci-fi romps.
In those circumstances, it's worth a go.
- Charles Loughrey
