On Terry Gilliam's '12 Monkeys'

Did it break the spell? Did rewatching Terry Gilliam’s time travel film 12 Monkeys release the hold it has had on me these past months, haunting my thoughts and dreams, sometimes submerged and half-recognised, but there? This time it was, indeed, a little diminished: shorter, ricketier, with too much of that insipid, even brightness that is now recognisable as the look of that strangely unsettled time, the mid-1990s, in American filmmaking and American life. Too explicit in its motifs, and more than a little implausible, even for a time-travel picture – would they really show the Marx Brothers’ 1931 film Monkey Business or documentary footage of lab techs experimenting on rabbits on the quaintly black-and-white TV-set in a psych ward?