Month: January 2015

In the US: Fridays, 9/8c, Syfy
In the UK: Acquired by Syfy UK. Begins 9pm, 27 February 

For quite some time now, Syfy has been coasting. Gone are the halcyon days when Battlestar Galactica was the toast of the town. Indeed, with a schedule intermittently packed with wrestling, reality shows and knowingly bad B-movies, it was possible to surmise that Syfy had changed its name from the Scifi channel not just for trademarking purposes but so it could avoid having to show sci-fi, with what little it did airbeing anaemic-to-poor knock-offs (Alphas) or imports (Continuum, Being Human, Bitten). 

However, for the past couple of years, Syfy has been trying to raise its game in original programming. Sometimes, the quality’s been awful (Dominion, Z Nation), sometimes it’s been okay (Defiance, Helix), but so far, nothing’s been great.

12 Monkeys doesn’t quite change that track record, but given what’s gone before it, it’s surprisingly good. The film, 12 Monkeys, was a Terry Gilliam classic, itself based on the Chris Marker’s 1962 ‘photo-roman’ La Jetée, in which a time traveller from the future comes back to the modern day to prevent armageddon. However, time paradoxes mean that the story has more than a twist or two.

Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, as well as being a movie rather than a series of photos, adds many plots and sub-plots to Marker’s story, portraying a virus-devastated future from which Bruce Willis returns to find out the source of the virus and prevent the future from happening. Along the way, he meets a doctor (Madeleine Stowe), with whom he falls in love and convinces he’s from the future, and a psychiatric institute inmate (Brad Pitt), who is the head of ‘the Army of the 12 Monkeys’, the likely cause of the virus. And again, as with La Jetée, there are plenty of timey-wimey twists.

This new TV version moves things on slightly and straightens out some of the twists. Our new hero is Aaron Stanford – best known as Pyro in X-Men 2 but also doing serviceable secret agent turns in both Nikita and Traveler – and he’s come from 2043 to find out the source of a viral outbreak that’s set to happen in 2017. Why him? Because in the future, the few remaining survivors of the virus find not only a time machine that can ‘splinter’ someone back in time but also a message from a CDC doctor, Amanda Schull (Louis’ helper in Suits), saying that he is the one who must help stop the virus from getting out. Will he convince her of what’s going to happen? Will he be able to find who’s really behind the viral outbreak? And how many time paradoxes will he encounter along the way

Here’s a trailer.

Continue reading “Review: 12 Monkeys 1×1-1×2 (US/UK: Syfy)”