Remakes and reboots have a bad reputation. Many have angered their source material’s fanbase, who often criticize the result for appearing to trade creativity for a profit, while others have missed the point of the original. It is relatively rare for a sci-fi remake to be better than the original, but when a production reflects the spirit of the source material while further expanding its world, it can capture lightning in a bottle. This approach made a remake of a cult Brad Pitt movie into one of TV’s best time travel shows, despite the series reinterpreting the original movie.
The movie 12 Monkeys follows James Cole (Bruce Willis,) as he travels back in time to investigate a plague that is on track to wipe out humanity. Rather than attempting to stop the virus, Cole’s mission is to bring information back to the future so that scientists can engineer a cure. The movie is a sci-fi masterpiece, but the reboot is a rare TV show that masters time travel by going even deeper into the psychological toll of the process.
Even the best time travel movies and TV shows tend to center on a mission to change future events by traveling to the past, but both versions of 12 Monkeys are far more complicated and all the more fascinating for it. Unusually for the sci-fi subgenre, neither contend with plotholes and paradoxes, and in an even more surprising twist, the 12 Monkeys TV show is often deemed better than the movie.
12 Monkeys Is Narrowly Better Than The Bruce Willis & Brad Pitt Movie
Brad Pitt and Bruce Willis’ performances made 12 Monkeys a timeless sci-fi classic, but the movie is still respected today for managing a feat that few other time travel movies and TV shows have achieved. 12 Monkeys avoided time travel clichés by treating time as a fixed loop rather than approaching it as a video game might, with “respawning points” that allow the protagonist to try again with different choices. This relative lack of agency allows the story to be compact, and restructuring it into a TV format could have been a one-season failure. However, the series surpassed expectations.
Rather than stretching the movie’s story into multiple seasons, the TV reboot instead offered a different creative approach to the same core premise, even reimagining a plot threat with potential that the Brad Pitt and Bruce Willis movie never used. The movie introduced the Army of the 12 Monkeys as a radical animal rights group that could have been connected to the virus, but turned out to be a red herring. On the other hand, the TV series reimagined them as the central threat and conspiracy running throughout its four seasons.
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Comparing the 12 Monkeys movie and TV show |
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|---|---|---|---|---|
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Title |
Format |
Year |
Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating |
Rotten Tomatoes audience rating |
|
12 Monkeys |
Movie |
1995 |
88% |
88% |
|
12 Monkeys |
TV show |
2015 |
88% |
78% |
At first glance, the show introduced more typical time travel mechanics, like the ability to influence future events and create paradoxes, but its approach goes in a more philosophical direction, exploring the question of what matters when nothing is permanent. This makes the series a deeper work of sci-fi that then had the time to develop its central characters, like Cole, a scavenger rather than a convict, and Jeffrey Goines, reimagined as Jennifer, and the eccentric heart of the show.
Audiences gave the show a 78% positive Rotten Tomatoes score which, while still impressive, did not match the movie. However, critics gave both an 88% positive rating, with some reviews describing the show as “the best time travel series you’ll ever watch,” and acknowledging that the series surpasses the movie in some key ways, with some of these arguably being due to the TV format, which allowed the complex story to evolve.
Why 12 Monkeys Is Better Suited To A TV Series Format
The key to the 12 Monkeys TV show’s success is the way it elaborates on the movie’s themes and details in a way that two hours simply could not cover. Time travel is often used as a sci-fi equivalent to magic, but the longer timeframe allows the show to address its mechanics as well as its implications. 12 Monkeys‘ 47 episodes deliver sci-fi at its best for this multifaceted approach, putting it on a level with masterpieces like Lost and Dark.
The original movie featured phenomenal acting performances, but it did not have the time for the deep character development, long-form deliberate pacing, and hidden details that the series became known for. The 12 Monkeys TV show set up payoffs and twists early on, through throwaway lines and details that become central to major turning points in the final episodes, and with one of the greatest finales in sci-fi TV, 12 Monkeys holds up better on a rewatch than the movie.
This story originally appeared on Screenrant
