12 Monkeys

12 Monkeys
Twelve Monkeys DVD
Directed by	Terry Gilliam
Written by	David Webb Peoples, Janet Peoples
Produced by	Charles Roven
Starring	Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, Brad Pitt
Distributed by	Universal Pictures
Running time	129 min
Budget	$29,000,000 (estimated)

Twelve Monkeys is a 1995 science fiction time travel movie directed by former Monty Python member Terry Gilliam and inspired by the short film La Jetée. It deals with problems of time and memory, and features performances by Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe and Brad Pitt.

Synopsis

Bruce Willis stars as James Cole, a convited petty criminal of about a generation in the future, when a remnant of the human race lives in a sealed underground environment due to contamination of the surface world with a disease that killed off most of the human race in 1996. The movie takes its title from the fact that the disease is believed to have arisen as an act of bioterrorism by a mysterious group calling itself The Army of the Twelve Monkeys.

As a convict, Cole is occasionally coerced into "volunteering" for dangerous missions to the surface in a biohazard suit, where he explores an abandoned Philadelphia for biological specimens (presumably as a source of information about the disease, which may lead to protections against it). Cole proves himself to be a careful observer with an excellent memory, and is therefore "volunteered" to participate in a more ambitious branch of the program.

For the special program, the scientists of the future have developed a system for sending individuals, naked, on round trips to the past. Cole and others are sent into the past in order to track down the origin of the disease so that a scientist can be sent back to study it directly. After some unspecified amount of time in the past the time travellers simply disappear out of the past and re-appear in their own present, sick and badly disoriented.

The time travel mechanism is not very reliable with respect to hitting the target date, and on a briefly portrayed trip Cole and one of his associates are sent all the way back to World War I, where Cole is shot in the leg, he and his friend are caught in a photograph, and his friend merits a minor footnote in history because of the French doctors' conclusion that he forgot French and retained English with an unrecognized dialect as the result of shell shock. The plot line also hints that other explorers were inadvertantly sent back as far as the Fourteenth Century.

The scientists try to send Cole back to October 1996, a few weeks before the outbreak of the disease, but on his first trip he lands in April of 1990 instead. He is arrested after a violent resistance that leaves the authorities believing that he is insane — not least because he claims to be a time traveller from a near future where the world has been transformed by disease. He is therefore institutionalized, placed under the care of psychiatrist Dr. Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe), and meets another institutional inmate named Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt).

Goines, in addition to being seriously deranged, is an animal rights and anti-capitalist activist. The movie's extended portrayal of the encounter between Cole and Goines weaves Goines beliefs into the fabric of the film's treatment of disease and time travel; for example, Goines opines that germs are a myth invented to help sell medicines and disinfectants.

Goines helps Cole escape the ward were they are held, but he is quickly recaptured and placed in restraints in an isolation cell. While there he "disappears" back into the future, leaving the authorities baffled about his disappearance.

Between 1990 and 1996 the psychiatrist, Kathryn Railly, takes an interest in prophets of doom who claim to be from the future and predict the destruction of the world by disease, and publishes a book on the topic. (We are left to assume that her interest was triggered by her encounter with Cole in 1990.)

Cole's second trip to the past put him in the trenches during World War I, as mentioned above.

On his third trip he arrives at the target date, about six weeks before the disease broke out during the Christmas season of 1996. Having found a poster announcing one of Railly's talks and book signing sessions, Cole kidnaps her to enlist her aid in his mission. She believes him to be delusional, but feels sympathy for him and begins to help him a little after he passes on some obvious opportunities to harm her.

As the story unfolds, Cole is gradually convinced by Railly's arguments that he is merely delusional, but various events and evidence of the World War I episode described above cause her to begin to take him seriously. Ultimately they track down the Army of the Twelve Monkeys and report it to the scientists of the future via a voice mail message, which is recovered in the distant future and has the recurrent effect of causing Cole's mission to begin with.

Cole, now in love with Railly and the open air of the pre-disease world, decides that he has done his duty and will stay in what he perceives as "the past" to enjoy it. At the last moment he puts together the actual cause of the disease, reports it in another voice mail message, and gets himself killed in an attempt to stop the bioterrorist. The story is brought to a full circle as the young Cole sees his future self shot dead at an airport.

In a final scene one of the scientists is shown taking a seat beside the bioterrorist on an airplane, and introducing herself as "in insurance". We are left to conclude that Cole's mission was a success, and provided some hope of salvation for the humanity of his era.

There is also a strong suggestion that Cole had to die due to his decision to remain in his past, which is "not allowed", perhaps by the rules of the society that sent him, or perhaps by the laws of physics.

The movie's treatment of the well-worn theme of time travel is intriguing, but not particularly deep. A number of elements of the plot are not well motivated, such as why the humans of the future live in a sealed underground environment rather than a sealed aboveground environment, and why a study of the original form of the disease would be more helpful than a study of the mutated variants actually present in the scientists' own time.

Coincidences with Fight Club

Template:Spoiler The Jeffrey Goines character is in some ways similar to Tyler Durden, a character that was also played by Brad Pitt in the 1999 film Fight Club. Jeffrey creates the Army of the 12 Monkeys just as Tyler Durden creates his own army of "Space Monkeys". Both strongly criticize the consumerist society they live in and want to destabilize the system and flip it upside down. Two particular scenes in the movies, in which Jeffrey kidnaps his own father in 12 Monkeys and in which Tyler kidnaps the police chief in Fight Club, are also both quite similar. In the novel of Fight Club, the narrator ends up in a mental institute, the same sort of location Jeffrey first appears in 12 Monkeys.

Criticism of Institutional Psychiatry

In both future and present time periods, Cole copes with institutions of professional psychiatry. Though less apparent in the future period, a planned society with scientists in authority, control and manipulation of the population is asserted, presumably through the Permanent Emergency Code, by "diagnosing" inmates with "social diseases" such as "Violence", "Antisocial (Level) 6", "Defiance", "Insolence", and "Disregard of Authority", completely blurring the line between prison and mental institution. This thematic criticism of the role of psychiatric institutions in the shaping of popular expectations and behavior parallels the modern history evalution made by Adam Curtis in The Century of the Self. Simply put, these inquire whether psychiatric institutions have filled the secular role formerly occupied by the Church in historical religious societies.

Trivia

Towards the end of Twelve Monkeys there is a scene set in a movie theater. The film seen playing in the background of these shots is Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, and the scene that appears is that of Scottie and Madeleine in Big Basin Redwoods State Park where Madeleine looks at the growth rings of a felled redwood and traces back events in her past life as Carlotta Valdez ("here I was born... and here I died"). As well as obviously resonating with larger themes in Twelve Monkeys, this scene can also be considered Gilliam's tip of the hat to Chris Marker, whose La Jetée inspired Twelve Monkeys. La Jetée features images of tree rings in several museum scenes, and the connection between La Jetée and the scene from Vertigo is also observed explicitly by Marker in his 1982 documentary montage Sans Soleil.

An additional irony can be seen in the scene in the movie theatre lobby, where Madeleine Stowe and Bruce Willis embrace. The irony in this is that, in the scene that was just shown from the movie Vertigo, an actor named James embraces a character named Madeleine, wheras here, a character named James embraces an actress named Madeleine.

The British actor Simon Jones plays one of scientists who sends the Willis character back to the 90s. Jones played the time-travelling Arthur Dent in the venerable BBC production of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the final installment of which likewise concludes with the song What a Wonderful World as performed by Louis Armstrong. Jones has appeared in other Gilliam films.

A "making of" documentary about the film, The Hamster Factor and Other Tales of Twelve Monkeys, was made by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe.

The story told by self-proclaimed time traveller John Titor has strong parallels with the story line of The Twelve Monkeys.

The notion of a time machine that projects the traveller into the past in the nude (i.e., without any equipment) also appears in the Terminator movies and in David Drake's novel Birds of Prey.

External links

• Twelve Monkeys at IMDb
• An analysis of Twelve Monkeys An analysis on the time travel temporal anomalies by M. Joseph Young.