Essentials: Twelve Monkeys

"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." Thus with these words, Twelve Monkeys (1995) begins its opening credits. It's an ominous prologue for an ambiguous yet amazing movie brought into the world by writers David and Janet Peoples and molded into a tangible and indelible entity by director Terry Gilliam. Yet to say Twelve Monkeys is a tale about a dystopian future would be an understatement.

Twelve Monkeys begins with our hero James Cole (Bruce Willis) waking up from a reoccurring dream, seemingly placed in a prison of sorts against his will. His is to be volunteered for a mission on the surface of the earth. He is then informed by a group of scientists that they have the ability to time travel and can go back to the events preceding the deadly virus that wipes out most of humanity. They want him to go back and gather information on a group of radicals known as the Army of the Twelve Monkeys; perhaps bring back a sample of the virus in its original form before it mutated. Thus Cole goes through quite an odyssey bouncing back and forth through time to connect the dots.

The film co-stars Madeleine Stowe and Brad Pitt who along with Willis bring their incredible acting abilities to the table. Much hubbub has been made about Pitts performance as the comically deranged Jeffrey Goines and by all means he certainly deserved his supporting actor nomination. However

Bruce Willis can act? What a twist!

Willis's frailty and uneasy confusion is a real sight to see when you consider that no one besides Gilliam and M. Night Shymalans has thought to put him in anything other than pulpy action thrillers. His character is our assumed surrogate for our feelings and as his mind slowly breaks apart before us we start to mistrust his judgment and even his sanity. They say that the insane don't know they're insane. From their perspective everything they see or do is rational and normal. But in Cole's case, he looses his grip on reality when he declares himself insane.

By the midpoint of the film Madeleine Stowe's character psychologist Kathryn Railly becomes our sympathetic inference but near the end we even start to lose her in the ether. Insanity is a very relative term and while giving its audience a very stylistic yet conceivable image of apocalypse, Twelve Monkeys forces us not only to question the rational of the characters but our own sanity as well. It's a theme that director Terry Gilliam has explored in nearly all of his films, the nature of insanity within our society. While his earlier films such as Time Bandits (1981) and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) had a much more hopeful viewpoint on delusion, his later films, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), Tideland (2005) and Twelve Monkeys are much more fatalistic.

They say a symptom of insanity is repeating
the same thing, expecting different results

Fatalistic yet brilliantly envisaged. For like Gilliam's magnum opus Brazil (1985), Twelve Monkeys can be interpreted in multiple ways. In the film, Cole speaks while watching Vertigo (1958), "The movie never changes, it can't change but every time you see it, it seems different because you're different." During test screenings, Twelve Monkeys got mixed marks echoing Cole's sentiment. Is Twelve Monkeys an easily defined genre movie? No. Can it be seen as a time-travel picture? No. Can I conclusively confirm the film is about insanity at all? No. Yet it works and works well.

I close my review with part of a Persian poem that I think captures the depth and enigmatical aura of Terry Gilliam's triumph:

Yesterday This Day's Madness did prepare;
To-morrow's Silence, Triumph, or Despair:
Drink! for you know not whence you came, nor why:
Drink! for you know not why you go, nor where.
-74th Quatrain of the Rubaiyat by Omar Khayyam

Final Grade: A