Terry Gilliam's ambitious "12 Monkeys" was co-authored by David Peoples, who wrote "Blade Runner," and it has the same view of the near future as a grunge pit - a view it shares with Gilliam's own "Brazil." In this world, everything is rusty, subterranean, and leaks. The movie uses its future world as a home base and launching pad for the central story, which is set in 1990 and 1996, and is about a time traveler trying to save the world from a deadly plague.
The traveler is Cole (Bruce Willis), who in the opening shots lives with a handful of other human survivors in an underground shelter put together out of scrap parts and a lot of wire mesh. The surface of the planet has been reclaimed by animals, after the death of 5 billion people during a plague in 1996.
Cole is plucked from his cage and sent on a surface expedition by the rulers of this domain, who hope to learn enough about the plague virus to defeat it. Later, he is picked for a more cruci
Science fiction is a broad church. From the dizzying derring-do of space opera to the cerebral ruminations of Isaac Asimov and his cohort, to the cynical post-modern worlds of cyberpunk and the 70s New Wave, all the way back to the scientific romances of the 19
th century – it’s a big, sprawling genre.
SBS World Movies knows this, that’s why we’re getting Sci-Fi Week from Monday, August 31, a cavalcade of mind-bending masterpieces including
Under the Skin,
Transcendence,
Marjorie Prime and more. But science fiction is too vast a genre to be contained to one week – SBS has a wealth of speculative drama on offer.