ames Cole is a prisoner, convicted of a never-specified crime and held in a cell not much larger than a packing crate. His confinement is an extreme version of that suffered by all humans: After a plague killed 5 billion people in 1997, the survivors moved to subterranean bunkers, cut off from the surface by airlocks and rigorous decontamination procedures. Leaving nature to make an aggressive comeback, humanity has survived below ground, but the hope of returning to the surface has not been extinguished.
The first step in taking back the planet is to find out as much as possible about the plague ... and to that end, Cole's jailers dangle the chance of a pardon before him. In exchange, he must travel into the past and get a sample of the killer virus in its purest state. Failing that, Cole is tasked with gathering any information he can on The Army of the Twelve Monkeys, a group that may have been responsible for spreading the disease in the first place.
Cole's first couple of timejumps go badly—the first takes him to 1990, six years before his target of 1996. As he struggles to adjust, his strangeness attracts police attention and lands him in a mental institution. The second jump takes him to the trenches of World War I, where he is promptly shot. Third time lucky, Cole—with an antique bullet lodged in his leg—reaches 1996. There he manages to track down a psychiatrist who treated him on his first visit to the past. Abducting her, he travels to Philadelphia in pursuit of the Army of the Twelve Monkeys ... and the delusional visionary who leads it.
Fixed timelines foretell a bleak future
Time-travel fiction and films are often optimistic, leaning heavily on the Back to the Future model wherein a person can, by traveling into his or her past, remake it for the better. In 12 Monkeys, nothing could be further from the truth. From the beginning, Cole and his handlers insist that the past is fixed, that his presence is another already accounted-for factor in the coming disaster. This does not leach the story's suspense away. On some level Cole—and the audience—cannot accept this view, and as he becomes swept up in trying to save the world after all, he takes the viewers with him.
Directed by Terry Gilliam, this movie features a depressingly grubby future, one that makes the real world of The Matrix seem positively slick. Its look will be familiar to fans of Gilliam's Brazil. The direction is superb, following Cole through four time periods and yet making each jump distinctive and clear. Each scene is set up so as to give viewers a chance to opt out of Cole's version of events, inviting the belief that Cole is merely delusional, that the world and its people are safe. Eventually Cole himself chooses this interpretation of reality, with tragic—but inevitable—results that are beautifully foreshadowed in the film's first scene.
If Madeleine Stowe is just barely adequate in the role of Cole's psychiatrist, Dr. Kathryn Railly, hers is the only weak performance in the movie. Bruce Willis as James Cole is simply riveting, moving through a wide spectrum of emotions and mental states from raving madness to heroic self-sacrifice. He delivers a characterization that could easily hold the movie together by itself, but fortunately that is unnecessary. Instead, he plays off Brad Pitt, who is delightfully crazed as the leader of the Army of the Twelve Monkeys.
12 Monkeys may not be the tour de force that Brazil was, but it is gripping, well-scripted and beautifully put together, a movie that holds up to many viewings and shows new facets every time it is screened.
