Rating: 
Summary: Confusing, many times over.
Review: I'm still not sure what to think of this movie. I have seen it quite a few times and yet it still doesn't make sense to me.
When mental patient James Cole (Bruce Willis) is sent back in time to find information on a lethal virus has wiped out five billion people in 1996. Mistakenly, he arrives in 1990. After explaining his plea to Dr. Kathryn Railly, (Madeleine Stowe) he is placed in a mental institution. In 1996, he kidnaps Railly, using her to find the 12 Monkeys, a group of revolutionists that are planning to release the virus into select cities. But he is wanted by the authorities for murder and kidnapping, plus he refuses to return to the future.
Rating: 
Summary: I didn't like it.
Review: I never liked this '12 Monkeys', mainly because it is too weird and morbid. I thought the characters and acting was stupid. The blood in the end looked so fake.
Rating: 
Summary: Good movie, I have to watch it a little more to . . .
Review: This is a good movie. I didn't give it a five because it seems as if something was lacking. I don't know what it was, but that is probably why I'm not a director.I think the whole movie is summed up where Cole (Bruce Willis) has trouble deciding what is real about half way through the movie. And, also, the theme that goes along with that is who is crazy and who decides that they are crazy that I think is echoed in the beginning mental institution scenes. I can't say much more. Yeah, too much, and I'll give away the movie; which I hope I haven't already. Brad Pitt, Madeline Stowe, and Bruce all do a good job. It's funny, and frightening (a little), and deep. I'm still trying to figure out a few things. I've watched it about 8 times.
Brad Pitt is pretty funny throughout the scenes that seem to be important for the movie. Maybe the writers did it on purpose- to lighten it maybe, but nonetheless they are pretty powerful and moving scenes. And that's about it.
Rating:
Summary: Gilliam's version of The Terminator
Review: Terry Gilliam took a studio assignment for this movie. If he didn't direct it, someone else would have. They hired him while the pre-production was already scheduled, so he didn't have to build this one from the ground up. That gave him the freedom to just *direct*, but it also removed some of his unique sensibility from the film. The result is a movie that could have been amazing if it wasn't so . . . Hollywood-ized. The actors are movie stars first, actors second, so you get distracted seeing pretty faces in ugly settings. The plot is both dull and pointlessly convoluted. It starts with a great idea --- is he from the future or is he insane? --- and then you get the tacked-on romance and too many action scenes. By the final twenty minutes you'll get impatient, waiting for everything to wind up. The best thing about the DVD is the documentary, "The Hamster Factor." You get to see Gilliam rant and sob and laugh at seemingly random moments. One minute he's upset about something trivial, the next he's happy when a major shot is falling apart. That's good because you should see the "warts and all" view of making a movie, not a censored version. Gilliam is a genius but also a bit of a madman, and the documentary gives you a taste of that.
Rating:
Summary: ¿ONE CRAZY DREAM
Review: The movie is like one big crazy dream: its characters, its storyline, its settings, its props. It is this very quality of the movie, which makes it too overbearingly sickening, and at the same time, a really good one, and worth pondering on. The whole movie revolves around time-travel. This itself sounds a bit insane. If this is not enough, the muddled characters, and the disturbingly unimaginable path the movie goes through, only to reach a seemingly absurd end, could prove to be too much on the senses; and if one is looking for even a teensy weensy bit of reality, then this movie has all the essential elements to render it as one of the worst sci-fi ever. On the flipside, the movie also has all the sine qua non of a very well-made science-fiction flick, only if taken in the right sense. The movie is actually meant to be a crazy dream. Considering the concept of the movie, it is best made, like a crazy dream. The acting is extraordinary. With 'insanity' being the cool word binding the movie, both the lead actors, Brad Pitt and Bruce Willis, do justice to the nutty parts, assigned to them. Complementing the acting, are the symbolic backdrops: the subterranean world immersed in red metallic shades (hell), and the sublunary world, bitten with the bitterest icy cold (living hell.) This flick is best enjoyed, if one empathizes with the underlying messages behind the whole inanity of the movie and its characters: what will result the apocalypse? Is it man who will be solely responsible for apocalypse? Or, what on earth, are we humans doing with this planet? Is science too dangerous to handle? With a little pondering, forced or naturally invoked, one can actually identify with all the craziness of this movie. This flick represents our mad world, in which the end is really not that far away.
Rating: 
Summary: Cinematic Tour de Force
Review: Whoever selected the cast for this picture deserves an honor. There are probably fifty other actors who could have played the confused yet convincing Cole, at least a hundred who could have played the part of the endearing, made psycho and at least a thousand who could have played the female psychiatrist. But the selection of Willis, Pitt and Stowe was a stroke of genius. It is difficult to imagine anyway EXCEPT Willis in the role with his befuddlement, drive and raw emotions. And Stowe's slowly evolving awareness of something impossible to believe was a sight to behold. But it was the dark story line that both set the tone and carried the movie. This film is a mystery with a little science fiction thrown in for fun. What makes it so alluring is the absence of blatant "here it is" storytelling. Lots of inferences and off the screen suppositions. Several scenes stand out - the shot of the NY Library, the inquisition before the panel, the final, desperate lunge and sudden remembrance...the whole effect chilling. A perfect film noire.
Rating:
Summary: Good Documentary in the DVD
Review: What makes this film so great is in the details. The cartoons that comes on in the background. The ingenious meshing of Hitchcock dialog in the theater scene. Just to mention a very few. And the intelligent premise that someone actually coming to us from the future would very likely be treated as insane and institutionalized in our present, rather than hailed as a hero. I always considered Brad Pitt as a just a "face," but this movie proves otherwise. His performance eclipses that of Bruce Willis, even though this is considered the start of Willis' more serious acting endeavors. Worth mentioning: Included in the DVD, there's a significant documentary entitled "The Hamster Factor and Other Tales of Twelve Monkeys." It's more than the usual "Making Of. . ." press-kit documentaries that are thrown in with other movie DVD's, and worth watching/sitting-through. It shows the agonizing process of film making in general, even for someone like Gilliam.
Rating:
Summary: Let's hear it for the man and his virus
Review: It's just another intelligently written, visually stunning, highly imaginative, well acted, post-bio-holocaust, time travel, tragicomic adventure-romance. Most of your friends won't like it because it isn't a formula they have seen about 10,000 times before. If you never voluntarily read anything and hate interesting science fiction you will absolutely despise this film.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: Is Bruce Willis insane in this movie? You never know. His vision of life after a plague has wiped out most of humanity is pretty convincing. And you have to wonder why he would imagine a future so degrading to himself. But then he starts hearing voices and decides he is insane and there is no future apocaplypse. He's dragged back to the future a few more times (and you don't know if it's real or imaginary) and is eventually told that he has solved the case, the scientists will prevent the end of the world. But he time travels back to the present and sees himself as a youngster watching himself die when he is killed. (An event he describes earlier in the film, but from his child's eye, with which he saw it, he saw someone else die.) Even the closing sequence is ambiguous. Is the woman who sits down next to the guy who sets off the killer plague from the future (she is one of the future scientists who interrogates Willis) or is it just a bizarre coincidence? Gilliam's accomplishment is to make this entirely schizophrenic film both interesting and popular. He truly makes insanity global. If you think there's more to the Oedipus myth than Freud, this flicks for you.
Rating:
Summary: Gilliam's best film
Review: Leaning more toward 4.75 stars here... I love Terry Gilliam, I truly do. But so much of his work suffers from too much creativity (Brazil, Baron Munchausen, etc.) that his brilliant vision often turns into clutter and noise. He needs a steadier hand to guide him at times, and we've found it with David People's marvelous screenplay. 12 Monkeys is Gilliam's most disciplined, moving and thought-provoking film precisely because we are able to relate to its ideas surrounding insanity, paranoia and doomsday. Bruce Willis is a convict in a dystopian future where nearly all of mankind has been killed off by a super-virus unleashed in 1996. The survivors live underground like rats and the animals (immune to the virus) are the only creatures on the surface. He is recruited to go back in time to retrieve a sample virus so that the scientist plutocrats who rule his society can develop a vaccine. OK, typical plot developments occur, right? "Bruce, back in the 1990s, is considered a crack-pot and a looney and he's locked up. He's got to get out and complete his mission and there's one person who can help: Dr. Kathryn Reilly, psychiatrist and do-gooder." But wait, there's more. So much more, including Brad Pitt (in my favorite performance as the maniac who may be behind the virus); complex time travel that effectively distorts YOUR idea of what's real; man's corruption of the earth; and a vision of humanity's collective madness that only Gilliam could capture. Because at the center is Bruce Willis as James Cole. A violent person hardened by life, but who can also listen to a song on the radio with the relish of a child. Madeleine Stowe is at her most luminous as Dr. Reilly, and the love that develops between them is neither unecessary or contrived. After all, love is their last grasp at what what it means to be real. Everything else is just a collection of artifacts.
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