It’s been a while since I last watched Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, but I do recall that it was pretty amazing. It had a brilliant cast and a wonderful premise. Everyone was dead and we just didn’t know it yet. One of the best parts of 12 Monkeys was that we didn’t know whether Cole was really a time traveler or just crazy. We also didn’t understand his mission for some time.
We have no such mysteries to worry about in Syfy’s 12 Monkeys, which goes into much more detail about Cole’s ability to travel through time and proves right off the bat that he is in fact traveling from one year to another. We are also told what his mission is-to stop the plague from happening and save seven billion souls.
12 Monkeys seems to have taken it’s time travel science straight from Frequency and Looper, where doing something in the past has an instant effect on the future. Cole’s time machine seems to be of a much higher quality than the one in the film as well and Cole himself appears to be some kind scientific marvel. A lot of cool stuff happens in the first couple of episodes.
This is not Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, but I think that’s a good thing, they aren’t trying to repaint the Mona Lisa here. On the bad side, it has the same slick and clean look of all recent TV science fiction. Even scenes where a mad woman draws on the walls with charcoal looks like graffiti made with a stencil-and she never seems to get any of the charcoal on her hands or clothes. The dystopian future also looks like a well laid out disorder with carefully placed old cars and other seemingly random items looking more like stage setting and less like years of neglect. But these are minor gripes. The TV show lacks the gritty vision of the film, but it still looks pretty good.
I’m looking forward to seeing how the story develops. Also glad to see Syfy getting back to some real science fiction.
