Discuss how genre and narrative features create meaning and generate audience response in Twelve Monkeys.

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Discuss how genre and narrative features create meaning and generate audience response in Twelve Monkeys.

‘Twelve Monkeys’ was directed by Terry Gilliam and released in 1995. Gilliam has written and directed many films including ‘Jabberwocky’ and the hit ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’, which starred many major actors, including Johnny Depp, Benicio Del Toro and Tobey Maguire. ‘Fear and Loathing’ follows a journalist and his lawyer as they embark on a drug-fuelled search for the “American dream”.

This film is similar to ‘Twelve Monkeys’ in that both are removed from reality and infer a strong sense of surrealism through the way they are presented. In ‘Twelve Monkeys’ this is done to embed a sense of fantasy into the films diegesis, whereas in ‘Fear and Loathing’ the hallucinogenic cinematography is used to reflect the drug-distorted world of the protagonist.

When ‘Twelve Monkeys’ films first starts the screen is black and green words appear on the screen as though being typed, letter by letter we read: “5 billion people will die from a deadly virus in 1997. The survivors will abandon the surface of the planet. Once again, the animals will rule the world.” We are told that this piece of non-diegetic information came from an interview with a paranoid schizophrenic.

The first scene shows an extreme close up of a young boys eyes, we hear nothing but a woman screaming “No!” We see a man running past people in some kind of public building; he falls to the ground and appears to have been shot. A blonde lady rushes to his side, the man lifts his bloody hand to her face. The camera keeps cutting back to the young boy who is surveying the scene with a kind of terrified curiosity.

This first scene immediately gets the audience asking questions; who are these people? What connection does the couple have to the young boy? Will the young boy be the protagonist of the film or is his appearance irrelevant? Gilliam incorporates this purposeful mystery to give us our first taste of the thriller element to the film.

During the final shot of the boy’s face we begin to hear a woman calling out names, this voice does not seem to belong in the current scene, and it doesn’t. The camera cuts to the face of a rugged, sleeping man. We have changed time and place suddenly which immediately serves to confuse the audience. “Cole, James” is the next name that the female voice shouts and the man awakes suddenly. He appears to be lying in some kind of metal cage on a hammock-style bed. Turning to the cage next to him, his friend tells him that they were naming volunteers “and called your name”. This sentence confirms that the first man we saw is James Cole. He sighs, rolls his eyes and heaves himself out of his bed. The friends continue to talk. Cole speaks of how none of the volunteers ever come back. The camera shows us a high angle shot of hundreds of other cages like Cole’s. One man is being lifted out of his cage by a large hook and we guess that he is one of the ‘volunteers’. The place is dark and we suspect it is underground, as the only light in the place is artificial. It is clear that this world is not the world that we know, the dark and gloomy features give a sense of doom to the audience, and we can tell that something bad has happened.

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The camera cuts back to Cole and his friend. Cole says that all the volunteers end up on the 7th floor with their heads messed up. The audience begins to wonder what type of work the volunteers have to do, and who they are working for.

The roof of Cole’s cage slides open. The camera cuts to a very futuristic looking man standing high above the cages, dressed in strange attire, much unlike the apparent prisoners. This man gives us our first taste of the futuristic mise-en-scene that appears throughout the film. The audience can safely assume that ...

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