The movie Twelve Monkeys is an interesting movie are my favorite science-fiction, time travel story. Loosely (very loosely) based on Chris Marker’s experimental short film La jetée, the time-travel romance is a movie that shows you exactly what’s going to happen, convinces you that it can be changed and then shows you that it can’t, while still giving you hope at the end. The performances, along with Gilliam’s notoriously skewed vision of technology, captures the ideas perfectly and makes Twelve Monkey’s a can’t miss movie. So, let’s see what happened. NOTE: Spoilers if you haven’t seen the movie. But it’s been 17 years, so you should have seen it.
James Cole (Bruce Willis) is a criminal in a harrowing future who has nightmares about having seen a man get killed in an airport while he was a young boy.. In the future, a deadly virus has ramaged through the world and the few remaining survivors are left huddled in underground cities hiding and hoping they can find a cure that will let them go back up and live on the world instead of in it. Cole is given a choice where he can leave jail in exchange for a scientific experiment. Newly developed time travel technology will send him back to 1996, when someone unleashed the virus, so that he can possible get a pure sample, which will help the scientists develop a cure. Due to a few bugs in the system, Cole ends up in 1990 and is thrown into a mental asylum. There he meets two people who will haunt him across time. Dr. Kathryn Railly (Madelaine Stowe) and Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt), who happens to be a lunatic son of a scientist who studies viruses. After an attempted escape, he ends up in a locked room where he simply disappears from (since he was brought back to the future).
On a second try, the send him back to World War 1, before correcting and getting him to 1996 (after identifying Goines in a series of pictures). Goines is a leader in The Army of the Twelve Monkeys, the environmental group assumed to have launched the virus. Cole finds Dr Railly again, as she is giving a speech on the end of the world book she has written. Cole kidnaps Railly and finds Goines to try to stop him. Goines convinces Cole that he’s doing it because of something that Cole said while drugged in the asylum 6 years previously. Cole ends up disappearing again. This time he’s starting to get more confused about which is real, future or past. He does convince them to send him back to 1996 one more time.
Meanwhile, Dr. Railly has found a picture of Cole from WW 1 and is slowly realizing that he might be telling the truth. Cole appears and they hide out (with some violent results) and head to the airport to escape. Cole no longer believes the future is real and they are trying to hide out, complete with disguises. On the way tot he airport, it turns out that the Twelve Monkeys didn’t launch the virus, they freed the zoo animals (and locked Goines Dad in a cage). Railly sees Goines’ assistant at the airport and (realizing that he was a whacko at her earlier speech) realizes that he is the true villain. Cole (complete with gun from the future) runs through security to try and kill the assistant, but is instead shot down himself. Railly runs and cradles Cole’s head as he dies and she looks around and sees Cole (as a child) in the airport seeing the vision about the man dying that he had remembered throughout the movie. The assistant gets on the airplane and the person sitting next to him is one of the scientists from the future.
The three lead performances (Willis, Stowe and Pitt) are all amazing. Willis is playing a subdued, confused and slightly dim character who is prone to extreme violence when needed. Stowe plays the competent, caring psychiatrist who slowly realizes that her insane patient might be telling the truth. Pitt is all manic energy and confusion. He has plans and beliefs that don’t quite mesh with reality, but Pitt plays him as a bundle of energy who can barely sit still and is happiest running around like a madman. The performances are what make the movie great. Without them, this movie would not have succeeded.
David and Janet People wrote the script and made it an amazing, circular story that starts off by showing you exactly how it’s going to end (Cole dying in the airport) and ends with it happening. But along the way, the script convinces you that there is a chance that Cole might be wrong (the details slightly change every time he remembers the shooting) and it gives you hope that they might be able to stop the virus from being released. But it ended just as the beginning told us it would. Cole dies and the bad guy releases the virus. But the presence of the scientist on the plane flight does give hope for a brighter future.
Gilliam brings his usual frenetic energy and skewed look at things to the picture. This is one of the few movies that he’s directed where he hasn’t been responsible for the script. But, from looking at the picture, you couldn’t tell. The future devices look like they came straight out of Brazil. The grime and grittiness of the future and the past is wonderful and does an amazing job contributing to the atmosphere of the movie. It’s a wonderful movie all around and one of my favorite in Gilliam’s oeuvre. Highly recommended.