Aaron Stanford takes over for Bruce Willis as a time traveler attempting to stave off the annihilation of the human race in the first trailer for Syfy’s series adaptation of “12 Monkeys,” based on the 1995 Terry Gilliam film of the same name.
In the original film, Willis’ James Cole was a prisoner in a dystopian future forced to travel back in time to stop a man-made virus that ends up wiping out most of the human race. Stanford takes over the Cole role here, time-traveling from a bleak future to the present, where he meets Amanda Schull’s Dr. Cassandra Railly, shocking her with the revelation that her future self sent him on this mission.
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That’s all pretty much the gist of the movie as well, but there will probably be some big changes. “It’s a complete re-imagining,” co-executive producer Terry Matalas told reporters at TCA on Monday. “We’re all big fans of the original film and we didn’t want to just re-do what the movie does. Everything from the top-down changed. While the story has a lot of the same themes, it wouldn’t make sense to tell the same story again.”
“12 Monkeys” is set to debut in January 2015 on Syfy.