The Earth lies devastated, its buildings neglected ruins. The surviving population driven far underground, its only glimmer of salvation hanging not in the here and now but the search for some kind of redemption in the immediately pre-cataclysmic past. Feeding a succession of ‘volunteers’ through their machines, the scientists hope that these time travellers will return with the final solution to human survival.

By common consent Chris Marker’s remarkable 1962 short La Jetee is a milestone in SF film-making. A 29 minute photo-roman - voiceover and stills - it contains some of the most poetic and lingering moments that beleaguered cinema has yet produced; finding in simple black and white images an imagination and poetry any number of not-so-special effects will never capture. (Currently available on Connoisseur Video and highly recommended.) It was shown to David Peoples, author of two contemporary cinema landmarks - Eastwood’s Unforgiven, Scott’s Blade Runner - with a view to remaking. Convinced, with some validity, that he couldn’t improve on the original, his final script - written with wife Janet - arrives marked with the unique Hollywood lineage ‘inspired by’. It is both very different from, and immediately identifiable as, a child of Marker.

From the shattered 2035AD comes violent convict James Cole (Bruce Willis), pardonable if he can source the virus that will soon be the death of over five billion people. But time travel is not an exact science it seems, and Cole splashes down in 1990 - six years too early. Incarcerated in an asylum, he is desperate to convince psychiatrist Dr Railly (Madeleine Stowe) he is indeed from her future, and that they must find the self-styled Army of The Twelve Monkeys, animal rightists led by rich kid loon Brad Pitt believed to deliberately release the virus in the last months of 1996.

A few years hence she will author of a book on the Cassandra Complex, but for now Railly will seek to prove to her patient that this is all an elaborate delusional fantasy constructed inside his own head. Then Cole vanishes, only to show up again first in a WWI trench and later in 1996, on the eve of what might prove to be the destruction of mankind. All the while he is plagued by dreams of a shooting at an airport.

The Peoples’ script is far more playful of its audience than Marker’s original. In introducing the aspect of dementia it seeks to keep us off-guard until the last possible minute, to keep hoping that Cole is indeed insane. And yet somehow - maybe because we are privy to his dystopian future from the word off - we are always more inclined towards his point of view. The cumulative effect is to have us hoping for redemption but playing out a terrible inevitability throughout the picture. It’s clever and, for the most part, highly successful, especially since Cole is also lumbered with the horror that he may have been the one to plant the destructive seed in Pitt’s mind back in 1990.

Better yet, Gilliam - like that other brilliant Hollywood maverick, Tim Burton - doesn’t like to get tied to extraneous detail. Like Marker, the time travel is never really explained (Willis seems to be somehow ‘injected’ naked into the past via a gigantic syringe), nor how he and the others avoided infection in the first place. We don’t (and why should we?) care. For once, this is a remake that doesn’t shame the original.

Pitt was Oscar nominated for his playing here, but it’s hard to see why. While it works in context, he’s too tick-tastic, too self-conscious to actually be that good. The bald Willis is far better, shorn of all mannerisms and smirks at the director’s insistence, he is better here than he was in Pulp Fiction, leading one to the inevitable conclusion that inside that bluff exterior a real talent lurks. He keeps Cole walking a razor-edge between vulnerably and unpredictable violence that adds a welcome additional layer of tension. Stowe, essentially the level-headed glue holding all this together, is impressive.

In the end though, and despite working to order from someone else’s script, this is still very much its director’s baby. The future looks to be carved straight out of his masterpiece Brazil, but we avoid nostalgic overload by having most of the action take place in the (near) present. And yet unlike the Robin Williams-heavy The Fisher King, he is allowed full rein on his imagination: without fear or favour, we know this very definitely for A Terry Gilliam Film. The sheer sense of scale, the exaggerated, cobbled-together machinery, the feel for absurdity could belong nowhere else.

And despite claiming not to have seen Marker’s short until after, the film does seem remarkably heavy with visual references, from eye-masks to hammocks. Willis and Stowe hide out at a Hitchcock fest; carefully weaving allusions to Vertigo, Chris Marker’s abiding cinematic passion.

Like all Gilliam pictures, Twelve Monkeys is too long - the central chase in particular - but is kept afloat by its sheer love of possibility. For Gilliam the willingness to fail spectacularly always seems to outweigh taking the easy option. Sometimes it works better than others - Brazil is finally regarded as a key work of the 80s; 1988’s wonderful Adventures of Baron Munchausen still awaits rediscovery - but, as always, a Gilliam film is an event.

The biggest conundrum in all these Twelve Monkeys, however, lies in their star-enhanced ability to make serious Hollywood money, whatever their art-house trappings. Like the otherwise very different Se7en the film’s view of the human condition is dark and essentially pessimistic. We have to accept that, against all advice, bleak is now proven box office, and the films the studios are churning out seem to be taking a turn for the better (or worse). Somewhere in the over-lit heart of La-La Land a light has gone out, and for once we get to savour the full darkness of its wake.