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.