Syfy puts new twist on classic


The Syfy channel has been notorious lately for its over-the-top shark-involved Z-movie releases, such as Sharktopus vs Pteracuda and Sharknado. These films, with their overt silliness and cheesy special effects, brought Syfy plenty of attention. Even as they are a far cry from the science fiction implied by their channel’s name.

However, after the intriguing first season of Helix last year finally brought science fiction back onto the slate, Syfy has, with gusto, revived a classic sci-fi story with their new 12 Monkeys series.

The show based on the script for Terry Gilliam’s 1995 cult classic of the same name, is is similar to  the recent trend of mid-90s cult movies being made into TV series. (Fargo, originally released in 1996, found an electrifying new life as an FX series last year, and From Dusk Till Dawn, also from 1996, had a enjoyably pulpy first season on the El Rey Network.) However, like those series before it, 12 Monkeys seems to have found an interesting, new spirit in the source material.

The story revolves around a man being sent back in time from a dystopian future to try and prevent what will become a devastating pandemic. Gilliam’s film has the director’s unmistakably weird fingerprints all over it. The story is important, but so is his manic, psychedelic vision of the story. As far as the series goes, the Syfy channel has trimmed the fat. Instead of trying to imitate Gilliam, which probably would have been a disaster, the story has been repurposed as an entertaining, action-packed thrill ride.

Aaron Stanford plays the male lead, who was portrayed by Bruce Willis in the original. Stanford is perhaps best known for his supporting role as the fire-wielding mutant Pyro in X-Men 2 and X-Men: The Last Stand. Here, he seems comfortable in the lead. The lead role in a time-travel action story is more about the charisma an actor can bring to the role than his acting chops, and Stanford brings plenty of screen presence as the man struggling to grasp the things he has to do to save the human race.

The basic story is essentially a hyper-driven version of the famous thought experiment where one is given the choice between letting a train run over 10 people or flipping the switch to put the train on a new track and killing one person. Stanford handles his character’s struggle with this dilemma more skillfully than one has a right to ask for in a series like this.

The rest of the cast is also rock solid. Amanda Schull also puts in an excellent performance as the second lead Dr. Cassandra Railly. Her role has been modified and expanded from the one Madeleine Stowe played in the original film. The character has changed from psychiatrist to virologist and has taken on a more prominent role. Emily Hempshire takes on the role which Brad Pitt knocked out of the park in the original. Pitt put in one of the best performances of his career as the insane Goines, but Hempshire has taken a more subtle tack to the role. Pitt’s performance had to be a heck of an act to follow, but Hempshire has found her own way with the character and it will be interesting to see where she takes it. Always great character actor Zjelko Ivanek also provides his ability to play sneaky, slimy antagonists.

Despite the surprising quality of the cast, the real star of the story is the time travel. Cole’s jumps through time are at the center of the story, both in driving the plot and in providing the most memorable scenes of the pilot. These scenes are all fun, but are often familiar to those familiar with time travel fiction. Like in the film, the time travel technology is inexact. So, in a plot development that will be nothing new to fans of Doctor Who, Cole appears to Railly in 2013 only to disappear for two years leaving Railly waiting for the mysterious time traveler to reappear while questioning her sanity.

In another familiar scene, Cole proves to Railly that he is indeed from the future by showing her own watch from the future and scratching her watch in the present to show her how the scratch appears on her future watch. Scenes like these appeared throughout Rian Johnson’s very fun Looper. Those scenes were also the biggest source of complaints about Looper’s time travel science. Namely, when you mutilate the past version of a person, more is probabilistically expected to change in the world than just those injuries magically appearing on the future version of the person. The leaps in the 12 Monkey’s scenes are a little less egregious, but as should be the rule with all time travel stories, it is probably best to accept the rules of the world and proceed with a healthy ability to accept suspend disbelief. If one is able to do that, then when scenes like Cole bringing the past and present watches together to create a paradox explosion, it can be a pure moment of excitement, without worrying about what would make a makeshift time paradox produce what amounts to a MacGyvered grenade.

12 Monkeys looks like a time bending rollercoaster courtesy of Syfy. It may have lost some of the frenetic philosophizing of the first one, but it is its departure from the vision of the original film that has allowed the 12 Monkeys series to take on a life of its own.

Correction: A previous version of this article stated the the lead actor’s name was Aaron Stanley. His name is Aaron Stanford. The Daily Trojan regrets the error.