12 Monkeys

Disclaimer:

The movie I’ll be reviewing this week is rated: R

This review contains adult content, and of course, spoilers!

Okay, for those who’re unaware of this movie: same here. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen it before, but I found it especially difficult to follow. Much like my Pan’s Labyrinth review, I’m coming back into this movie somewhat blind having seen the movie once in the past and having forgotten most of what happened. The main thing I do remember from the first time I watched this movie is that I walked away from it feeling underwhelmed. Ultimately I didn’t feel like anything deeper was being offered, I couldn’t make any sort of emotional connection with the characters, and whatever the intention of the filmmakers was: it wasn’t coming across to me on-screen. Although, there were still things that I did like about the movie, mostly the performances, cinematography, and creative-looking future the filmmakers created. Also, coming back to this film after being away from it as long as I have makes me hopeful that maybe there is something here that I missed the first time.

Mainly because that’s also one of my principles when it comes to films. If the first time I saw a film a long time ago I had a good impression of it, I tend to be harsher on it. However, if the first time I saw a film long ago I had a bad or neutral impression of it, I try my best to be forgiving and open to discovering something new about it. It’s my firmly held belief that being open to different points of view can only help us learn and grow as people. Sure in the case of movies the stakes are a lot lower, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any value in it. That’s probably more serious than I intended it to be, I don’t mean to bring the mood down. The movie will do that for me anyway. So if you’re willing to join me on this adventure, well there’s no time like the present!

If you’re ready, come with me back in time to the year 1996, don’t forget to restrain your twitchy Brad Pitts, and let’s take a look at 12 Monkeys!

Well this is a happy start to this movie.

We start off with this brief bit of expository text before immediately cutting to a stylized flashback of our main character James Cole (played in this flashback by Joseph Melito) witnessing a shooting in an airport when he was a child:

*Oh my God! Surely this won’t have any ramifications later on in the film!*
Yeah, keep dreaming kid.

This is followed by a cut back to present time with our protagonist (played by Bruce Willis) where our main character is chosen for “Volunteer Duty.” Yeah, one of the main things you’ll probably notice about this film from the outset is that much of the world, how it works, and why things are the way they are is kept very vague. I will give credit where credit is due though, there are several subtle touches (either visual or scripted) which help explain things a bit more. For example, we see Cole on “Volunteer Duty” being forced above ground where he collects various animals in jars. Why? Well, considering the opening text described this virus that ends up killing 5 billion people, you could reasonably assume that he’s gathering these small specimens for the purposes of analysis and hopefully to help develop a cure. This is confirmed when we see Cole go before a board of scientists who essentially act as this world’s version of government considering the only rule of law is survival and protection against a deadly disease at this point. It’s touches like these that make me enjoy the movie while I’m watching it. That and of course the mechanized future we see these characters inhabit.

A lot of the intrigue the movie creates for me is just in its intricate future design. We don’t even see that much of it since most of the time the film takes place in average city settings in the year 1996, but what is there really stays with you. Most of that is probably due to the fact that all of it was shot in front of the camera. Yes, none of this was done with CG and all of these sets were custom constructed including the future settings you saw, the mental institution we’ll see later, and the airport from the flashback. That’s no small feat, especially with a movie that’s this large in scale. Naturally the city scenes were shot on location, but it in no way takes away from the grandeur of the rest of these places. I will admit that some of the future designs can get to be a bit much though.

What’s even the point of this ball thing with screens on it?
What’s it supposed to be used for?
**THE FUTURE!**

Why is this giant lens in front of this scientist’s face?
Does it do anything or is it just supposed to look cool?
I mean it *does*, but still.
**THE FUTURE!**

Anyway, you’re probably wondering about the story. I am too, but I’ll break it down as best I can. One of my larger issues with the film is that it can be very difficult to follow. When the prison guards send in Cole to be examined by the scientists and bring up his past history, the PA system that discusses protocol on the way to the board room, and what the point of any of this is supposed to be is pretty muddy. I’ve watched this movie 4 times already and I can’t for the life of me understand what the heck any of these characters are saying and how it’s supposed to tie into the plot in this scene and several others involving the scientists later. At this point I think the general purpose of Cole going back in time isn’t so much to prevent the virus from ever breaking out, but more to collect samples like we saw him do earlier to help develop a cure in the present (which is actually the future). What eventually goes wrong is that he ends up going off on his own and trying to prevent the disease from ever breaking out, against the scientist’s original intentions, which is what ends up causing more problems. Granted that could be completely off, I have no idea.

Like what I said in my Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny review, I’m not against vagueness in movies. Sometimes keeping things open to interpretation ends up adding more to the material which makes the film stand out in the minds of audiences resulting in them returning to it years later to speculate about it more. Examples of films that utilize this well are: Inception which presents the idea of the spinning top identifying whether the main character is dreaming or not, Lost in Translation which has Bill Murray’s character whisper something to Scarlett Johansson’s character we never understand, and Pulp Fiction where the item kept in the briefcase is never shown. These moments work well in these films because they’re usually small details that allow you to fill in the gaps yourself as the audience member given your interpretation of the characters and material the movie presented to you. Where I don’t believe vagueness works well is with the overall plot of the movie. This is what the issue is here in 12 Monkeys, the whole time I never get a solid grasp of what’s happening and why it’s happening. Every movie should have a definitive reason to exist and that should be made clear in the plot and the actions the characters take, but for some reason that’s kept vague here. This results in a consistently empty feeling I have while watching which just makes me question why I’m even watching this in the first place. That’s not a good sign.

One thing I do like regarding the vagueness is how it’s not entirely clear whether Cole is just hallucinating all of this time travel stuff and is actually an escaped mental patient, or if it is actually real at first. In the opening after the scientists grill Cole it fades to black before we fade into Baltimore in the year 1990 where renowned psychiatrist and the (creepy (I’ll explain later)) love interest Kathryn Railly (played by Madeleine Stowe) gets called in to take a look at Cole fresh off of being caught in the street beating up 5 cops. What does help make up for the all-over-the-place plot is the believable and grounded performances which I honestly enjoy watching. This scene in particular does a great job of portraying Cole as a half rational person trying to achieve a goal by any means necessary and a half escaped mental patient like I said earlier with Kathryn being the healthy dose of reality caught in the middle.

The conversation eventually results in Kathryn having Cole transferred to the mental institution I mentioned earlier, Cole getting washed down in a scene clearly paralleling the decontamination scene from when Cole reentered the facility after going to the surface, and us being introduced to most people’s favorite part of this movie (me included): Brad Pitt as Jeffrey Goines.

While I don’t necessarily believe that Brad Pitt accurately portrays a character with a mental illness, no matter how many times I watch this movie I only ever see an actor playing mentally ill, the reason I like this character so much is because he’s very entertaining to watch. In literally every scene he’s in I find my will to keep watching this film revitalized since he’s constantly stealing the show. Technically he does have significance to the plot, but I legit don’t care. If this movie were just Jeffrey in various public spaces ranting and stirring up a scene I wouldn’t feel let down at all. I could literally watch just that for hours and laugh uncontrollably. Even when the things he rants about make practically no sense, the energy Pitt brings to the character is electric. Also, in the context of when this movie came out in 1995, Brad Pitt wasn’t considered a big name dramatic actor, or really capable of portraying anything else on screen other than hotness (at least according to my mom). At the time he was still primarily seen as the guy to put in your movie when you want to get horny young girls in the theatre, not a person to turn to when you actually intend for him to act. This was supposedly the film that proved Brad Pitt could actually act and what provided him the jumping off point to become the widely recognized actor he is today. Whether that take is true or not I don’t really care because either way Jeffrey is hilarious.

So Jeffrey shows Cole around the facility until eventually Cole has a sit down with the institution’s lead psychiatrists which is also a fun-house mirror version of the board of scientists we’ve already seen further blurring the line between reality and fantasy in this world. Cole talks about how he suspects along with the scientists from the future that this virus that ends up wiping out 5 billion people was unleashed by the Army of the 12 Monkeys. I’d also like to take this opportunity to say that it’s always annoying in movies like this where people from the future come back in time to warn people about what’s coming expecting everyone to 100% believe them without question. See Cole, this is why you’re in a mental institution. He convinces the doctors to allow him to use the phone to call a specific number which ends up not being what he expected further making you question if any of this is real, but Cole puts together that the reason the phone call didn’t quite work was because he’s supposed to be in the year 1996, but he’s instead in the year 1990. If only those scientists were better with numbers.

We also get another brief look at Cole’s airport flashback (get used to that, there’s a lot of it in the movie) until we see Cole in bed where he catches a spider. A spider he eventually swallows. Alive. Do spiders just not bite anymore?

Jeffrey also presents Cole with the prospect of escape and he promises Cole that he can help him. This eventually results in Jeffrey Jeffrey-ing to the point where the orderlies come in and drag him away while also exposing the fact that his father is a famous virologist to Cole and exposing his ass to the audience. Never change Jeffrey. The next morning, Cole and Jeffrey sit together watching a program on TV discussing videos of experiments that scientists have been doing on animals that were leaked to the public by animal rights activists. Cole mentions to Jeffrey that maybe humanity needs to be wiped out since they seem so insistent on dabbling with things they don’t understand and Jeffrey finds that notion quite…interesting. It’s at this point Cole gets his daily meds which put him in an unresponsive state making it more difficult for him to follow through with Jeffrey’s plan especially since Jeffrey just so happened to steal the key to the door. By Jeffrey-ing it up again, Jeffrey’s able to create a distraction to allow Cole to stumble his way to escape. He eventually ends up getting caught, strapped to a table, sedated, and rolled into an isolation cell though, but it doesn’t last long.

Now you don’t.
I also like how these shots are exact replicas of each other, another great strength of this movie is the camera angles.

So how did he do that? The movie presents the thought that maybe he somehow managed to break through his bonds, overcome his sedation, and climb the over 15 foot high wall to the top of the room and crawl through the air duct, but at this point it’s much more believable that he just went back to his original time. The institution staff is completely baffled and Cole, back in the “present” has a nice little chat with a disembodied voice. It’s unclear if this voice is another prisoner in another cell, a spy for the scientists, or just a voice in Cole’s head, but one thing that can’t be denied is that this voice has got some knowledge. He’s just as distrusting of the scientists as I am so I like him already, but the scientists end up grilling Cole again anyway about what he found out. Well it’s now that Cole rightfully calls out the scientists for sending him to the wrong year, yet they still act as if the lack of information they received on their subject was Cole’s fault. Despite not being politicians they sure act like them. So now they try to send him back to 1996 for realsies so he can actually complete his mission. This looks promising.

So Cole along with his friend Jose from earlier in the movie (played by Jon Seda) get sent back to WWI. Did I mention I don’t trust these scientist jerkoffs yet? Well I don’t. This little trip down world history lane gets Cole a free gunshot wound in the leg when we suddenly end up in 1996 with Kathryn Railly again. She’s teaching a class of people about her theoretical discovery the “Cassandra Complex” named after a woman from Greek legend who was condemned to be able to see into the future but never have anyone believe her which of course directly ties into what Cole has already experienced. Also, this guy’s here:

After leaving, Kathryn just so happens to come across Cole in the parking lot and he forces her to drive him to Philadelphia under the pretense that he’s armed. They have a bit of a shaky reintroduction to say the least until Cole asks Kathryn to turn on the radio because he’s supposed to receive a message. He instead gets an ad for the Florida Keys (by the way, the Florida Keys pops up a lot in this movie) and finds happiness again when he hears Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill” start playing which results in this interesting emotional moment:

To me, just the sheer contrast of emotions with Cole being elated upon returning to a safe and comfortable world while Kathryn is scared for her life and desperately trying to stay calm is equal amounts heartwarming, uncomfortable, and funny at the same time. On their drive they stop at a motel where Cole has another dream about the airport and notes that he recognized Kathryn in his dream. It’s around this point that I figured out what that’s going to end up being, but we’ll talk about it when we get there. What’s also funny is how Cole crawls over the tied up Kathryn so he can grab some money out of her purse for the vending machine. Mostly because it’s staged like he’s going to do something to her only to find out he was just hungry. After a while they make their way to Philadelphia and Cole points out red graffiti on the wall depicting the 12 Monkeys’ logo. See Kathryn, I was right! While she struggles with the concept of Cole being right about this, they run into a guy that has the same voice as the disembodied voice Cole heard in his prison cell in the “present”.

It’s unclear what exactly this is supposed to mean, especially since later in the movie they come across this guy again only for him to act like he doesn’t know them, but one thing it definitely does is blur more lines between is this all real or is Cole just crazy? The guy tells them about how the scientists keep track of their volunteers by putting a device in their teeth only to reveal to them that he ripped his own teeth out as well. With that out of the way, they make their way to an abandoned theatre because that’s where the graffiti trail leads, and -

By fending off their attackers (and killing them in the process), Cole manages to procure himself a gun which will prove to be quite useful, but also proves that he never had a weapon in the first place. When the two come across the hiding place of the 12 Monkeys by following the graffiti trail, Cole threatens them with the gun until they reveal what their plan is. They weirdly start talking about animal rights, protesting, and demonstrations which all, strangely enough, have nothing to do with deadly diseases that kill 5 billion people but they also admit that their leader is Jeffrey Goines. Yay, he’s in more of the movie! So after finding Jeffrey’s contact info they decide to pay him a visit, but not before Kathryn removes the bullet from Cole’s leg. Yeah, he’s been walking around with that this whole time. I equally don’t believe that he would’ve been able to last this long with a gunshot wound in his leg and that Kathryn would be able to adequately remove the bullet with only her knowledge as a psychiatrist to assist her in this situation. Anyway, we also get this weird moment:

It’s supposed to be a mystery whether he killed her or not since we see in a broadcast not too long from now that the police recovered a body from a ditch and suspect it might be Kathryn, but I’ll just reveal it: he didn’t kill her. So why did he grab her like that? Also there was practically no prompting to it whatsoever which just makes it even more awkward. At Jeffrey’s house we see how privileged he is since he lives in a mansion built on his father’s fame (his father played by Christopher Plummer) and how his father is currently throwing a fancy soirée in his own honor. I can see why Jeffrey called his father “God” now. Eventually some of the guards tell Jeffrey someone’s here to see him so he goes to see Cole only to shrug him off until he mentions the 12 Monkeys. Here Cole tries to get more information out of Jeffrey to see if he can try to stop him from spreading the virus which is also when Jeffrey reveals to Cole that he got the idea for the virus from him. When they were watching TV together earlier and Jeffrey heard Cole mention that maybe the human race deserves to be wiped out, he took that literally and pushed for his father to develop said virus (being a famous virologist).

Eventually a scuffle breaks out between the two, we get another Jeffrey patented rant, and Cole escapes using his usual Houdini tricks. Weird because he didn’t actually time travel this time, he just literally disappeared. I guess the script just interrupted the movie like “Hey, can we keep things moving?” Then we of course discover that Kathryn is still alive, Cole just stuffed her in the trunk (again, why did they shoot it all weird?) and she goes off on him. Security from the party eventually catches up with them but Cole disappears for realsies this time when he gets time traveled again. It’s around this part of the movie where it becomes definitively clear that the time travel that’s taking place is in fact real especially after Kathryn gets a call from the detectives that picked her up on party night saying that the bullet she removed from Cole’s leg is genuinely from WWI. Also she looks at this picture from the book she published a bit closer:

This was literally in ***your*** *book*, how did you not see that before?

It’s definitely at this point in the movie where I’ve kinda just given up on the story. I mean it’s not really keeping me invested, the characters aren’t really that interesting, and I’m starting to get an idea of what this is all amounting to anyway, so I’m really questioning why I’m still watching this in the first place. Maybe they’ll grace me with another Jeffrey appearance.

One interesting concept that the movie does bring up in these scenes however is the fact that time travelling has a negative effect on your mental state. Like we’ve seen with Cole thus far, and when he gets zapped back to the “present” and presented with an official pardon from the scientists, he denies that any of this is real and starts to believe what Kathryn has been telling him about all these thoughts he’s been having. It’s all just in his head. In the end, he’s lost track of what’s real and what’s not because of his body and mind shifting back and forth between time periods constantly. When you think about it, that really makes a lot of sense and I’m surprised that not more time travel stories bring up this sort of concept. Hardly anybody in these stories are like The Doctor in the sense that their entire race of people exists to travel through and manipulate time, these are just regular people being brought back and forth through various stages of existence they were never meant to see to begin with so I totally buy that they would start questioning their reality because of it.

After discovering that Cole isn’t crazy, Kathryn calls and tries to warn Dr. Goines (Jeffrey’s father) to be wary of the Army of the 12 Monkeys since she believes they’ll try to steal his virus. He doesn’t believe her and the other person in the room considers that possibly Kathryn is beginning to succumb to her own Cassandra Complex that she described earlier.

Back in the “present” the scientists try to prep Cole for one last mission and in 1996 Kathryn catches up with Jeffrey and his 12 Monkeys crew. It’s here that a lot of the little tidbits from the movie previously start to fall into place. There’ve been several instances up until now in the meetings with the scientists and other various events that have taken place in the “present” that have pointed to potential clues as to who caused the outbreak of the virus. Most of them have pointed to the 12 Monkeys as the culprits and they’ve ranged from pictures of graffiti, newspaper clippings depicting key characters, images of protests, and various other parallel occurrences from the past and the “present”. I will admit that it is pretty fun for me as an audience member just recognizing all these things that have appeared in the movie already and now finally seeing what they were in reference to. We see this when Kathryn leaves a message on the same number that Cole tried calling in 1990 which is the same message that we heard earlier in the movie when the scientists played it for Cole, Kathryn’s graffiti is the same message that the scientists have a picture of in their board room, and it all comes to a head when Kathryn and Cole drop by a showing of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and they start to put on disguises.

Okay, that hair is *definitely* familiar. Where’ve I seen that before?

While Kathryn tells Cole they have flight reservations for Key West (there’s the Florida Keys again), Jeffrey and the 12 Monkeys have effectively carried out their plan. It started with them kidnapping Jeffrey’s father and it only gets worse from here. They release the animals from the zoo! What? Yeah, that’s their evil plan. So we find out that this whole time the Army of the 12 Monkeys never had anything to do with releasing the virus. At first I saw this as a major let down, granted I know I wasn’t that invested in the story that much to begin with, but that’s literally the name of the movie and it turns out it means nothing. Doesn’t that just feel weird? Well, after I’ve thought it over, it still feels kinda weird, but it’s also pretty funny. The whole time this movie was building up one thing and ends up delivering another which also kinda ties into the ending, but that’s coming up here real soon.

Once Kathryn and Cole make it to the airport, Cole tries to let the scientists know that the Army of the 12 Monkeys had nothing to do with the virus by leaving a message on the same number Kathryn called earlier. They end up receiving that message and send Jose to intercept Cole and he gives him a gun to finish the job. Wait, who is he supposed to shoot?

*Who am I supposed to shoot?*
Hey, that’s what I said!

Unfortunately Cole doesn’t get an answer to that question before Kathryn shows up having figured out the puzzle. It was Dr. Goines’ assistant the whole time! Remember? That guy? Who was in like 2 scenes? Neither of which lasted longer than 2 minutes? That guy? Still lost? Here you go:

So yeah, our big villain now seems to be this random dude we barely saw before. Better? You know, the only way these bait-and-switches work is if the real culprit is equally or even more interesting than the first perceived threat. This is not an improvement. So they rush to intercept him and I was originally going to ask why this airport security seemed so lax until I remembered that this is 1996. Carry on. After trying as hard as they can to get past security, Cole ends up running after the guy and trying to shoot him recreating Cole’s flashback/dream that he’s been experiencing this whole movie. Surprise, young Cole was watching all this happen the whole time! Cole gets shot and killed and it’s revealed that he’s caught in a time loop and is weirdly responsible for his own childhood trauma.

Kathryn rushes to his side in his final moments because after the past however long they’ve been developing this weird sort of romance together. I wouldn’t mind it so much if the kid version of Cole wasn’t literally standing right in front of her. Isn’t it just so Breaking Dawn: Part 2 looking at a little boy from across the room knowing that he’ll eventually grow up to be the guy you wish would have sex with you? That’s just really creepy to me. Getting away from that nastiness, Dr. Goines’ assistant makes it onto his plane where we see one of the scientists sitting next to him and they discuss how humans are a sort of dying race destined for extinction. The movie closes with freshly traumatized young Cole staring into his wide angle lens until the credits begin to roll.

While you may not expect it considering the tone I’ve had throughout the majority of this review, I feel a sort of urge to try and defend this movie. You may be wondering “Why, you literally spent the majority of this review ragging on it?” but if I’m being fair, there is one thing that I haven’t discussed about this movie thus far: the point.

In the end, a lot of the problems I have with this film are still valid and still irk me as a viewer, but I’ve suddenly started to grow a deeper understanding of the reasoning behind it all. I meant every word I said in the introduction when I wrote it, but I now disagree with one of the points I made. I said that “Whatever the intentions of the filmmakers were, it wasn’t being portrayed on screen,” but I now see that as incorrect. Since I was having a hard time understanding what my feelings about this film were, I decided to ask someone else to watch the movie with me. This was my sister. At the end of our viewing, I asked her what she thought and she told me that it seemed like a very nihilistic film. When she said that, I knew exactly what she meant.

If there’s anything that’s consistently being portrayed in the film, it’s that certain things are inescapable no matter how hard you try to resist them. When it comes to timelines and the inner workings of the continuum, some things are just fated to be. This is what we see in 12 Monkeys. Despite Cole’s attempts to prevent the virus from breaking out and killing so many people, the timeline prevented him from doing that. You may remember that when Dr. Goines’ assistant sat down on the plane, next to him was one of the scientists. It’s my belief that this scientist came back in time to ensure that the timeline was left intact even at the cost of Cole’s life. Even she says to the assistant “I’m in insurance” which to me is her confession as to why she was there. This is a hard lesson to take, even for adults, that some things just can’t be avoided and knowing this as the filmmakers main thesis for the film to me justifies its existence.

Of course I do still have issues with the film, that I can’t deny. At the same time I do still like a lot of the concepts that this movie presents and hope to see those explored in other properties. I can’t say for sure if the 12 Monkeys TV series delves into these ideas more creatively than the film does since I unfortunately haven’t seen it yet, but even if that isn’t the case there are still things in this movie I wish to see more of. The creative future designs, the immersive camera angles, the brilliant performances, and those few nuggets of sci-fi inspiration for the next generation are what I love. While I still have problems following the overall story, getting invested in the action and the characters, as well as some downright confusing moments, some of these things I feel like I can forgive given the pros of the film. For instance the characters. I at first was disappointed that they weren’t especially interesting or developed, but knowing the filmmakers’ thesis for the film makes me realize that that wasn’t the point.

In the end, they made this film to get across a specific idea, and in the case of James Cole’s journey, I feel like it’s a really good encapsulation of that message. Maybe you aren’t quite sure if this film is for you or not, but I hope this review gave you a bit of clarity. Even with those difficulties I experienced while watching, I still overall feel glad that I saw it for those moments of the film that were truly unique and thought-provoking. If that’s enough for you, then by all means take a trip in your time machines this weekend movie night and experience 12 Monkeys for yourself!

I would personally rate this film a 3.5/5 monkeys. Like I explained before, I personally believe there are enough interesting concepts in this movie to make it worth seeing, but to some, the confusing story will certainly be difficult to overcome. For me, if I were to watch this film again it’d probably be once every 3 or 4 years, but I can see how many people could be inspired by it too, and that’s fine in my book.

(I make no claim of ownership for any of the images used in this post)

(Each of them are owned entirely by their respective copyright holders, which are not me)

(I’m just a humble blogger who talks about movies, I do not make them)

(Yet)

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