The original “12 Monkeys,” a brain-twisty Terry Gilliam film from 1995, is a good candidate for reinvention via TV series.
Though one of Gilliam’s most coherent movies (and that’s not saying much), this Syfy show turns its premise — a visitor from the future attempts to stop an apocalyptic pandemic — into a more straightforward time travel adventure.
Unkempt, frantic Cole (Aaron Stanford) terrifies Dr. Cassandra Railly (Amanda Schull) when he appears in the back seat of her car after her lecture on the looming threat of worldwide viruses. She understandably thinks he’s a wacked-out prepper, until he brings her on board (with a nifty, time-travelly trick) by proving he’s come from the year 2043 to stop the eradication of humanity.
Sent by a team of scientists, he enlists her help to hunt down and kill the man (Zeljko Ivanek) who supposedly introduces the virus into the population two years hence, in 2017.
Series creators Travis Fickett and Terry Matalas, who previously worked with Stanford on the assassin drama “Nikita,” have a good leading man.
He’s cut from very different cloth than Bruce Willis, who played the Cole character in the film; Stanford’s less brawny and more broody, more of an everyman; his dark past is only hinted at in the first two episodes, but it’s definitely there. He makes time travel look like it really hurts.
The series doesn’t stray too far from the standard, gloomy/serious-sci-fi palette — in fact, it’s sometimes a little tough to make out just what’s going on, through the darkness — but also occasionally erupts into cool visuals that should appeal to the sci-fi (er, Syfy) crowd.
The contraption that sends Cole through time looks like an MRI machine crossed with something from a James Bond villain’s dungeon. And while initially heavy on exposition, the series also gathers some nice momentum in action scenes, like the one in which Cole and Railly narrowly escape their captors.
“Want to see a paradox?” Cole asks, placing two versions of the doc’s wristwatch (one present, one future) next to each other to generate a slow-building explosion.
“12 Monkeys” doesn’t skimp on the villains, either.
Veteran character actor Ivanec, as an amoral scientist, is willing to do just about anything to get at Cole’s secrets, including vivisection; and then there’s the mysterious, murderous older gentleman (Tom Noonan, billed only as The Slender Man) who dresses like a genteel grandpa and covers his victims in flowers.
Also welcome is the presence of Kirk Acevedo as Cole’s best buddy in the after-plague future. He’s a reliably complicated and compelling presence, with plenty of sci-fi entries on his resume (including “Fringe,” which this show evokes).
The movie’s most iconic character, Brad Pitt’s Jeffrey Goines, has switched genders here. Played by Emily Hampshire, she’s the institutionalized daughter of Ivanec’s character, and can’t stop drawing angry monkeys on her room’s walls and floor. (How many monkeys? One guess.)
She manages to play unhinged without going full “Cuckoo’s Nest,” a rare achievement in TV asylum-land.
But it’s Stanford who will hold this thing together, and he seems up to the challenge. I’m ready to look at this whole story again with fresh eyes. It may not be quite on the level of a “Battlestar Galactica” overhaul, but, then, its source material isn’t nearly as campy.
In our current, pandemic-jumpy society, “12 Monkeys” looks likely to have a ready new viewership.