12 Monkeys movie review & film summary (1996)

Cole is plucked from his cage and sent on a surface expedition by the rulers of this domain, who hope to learn enough about the plague virus to defeat it. Later, he is picked for a more crucial mission: He will travel back in time and gather information about the virus before it mutated. (The movie holds out no hope that he can "stop" it before it starts; from his point of view, the plague has already happened, and so the future society is seeking treatment, not prevention.) Cole lands in 1990, bruised, bleeding, and dripping sweat and mucus from every pore (a large percentage of Bruce Willis' film career has been spent in this condition). He's thrown in jail, and assigned a psychiatrist, Dr. Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe), who believes he's delusional when he says he's a visitor from the future ("You won't think I'm crazy when people start dying next month"). He pulls off an inexplicable jail break and reappears in her life in 1996, kidnapping her because he needs help in finding 12 monkeys in Philadelphia that have the virus in its "pure" form before it mutated, later that year, into a killer of humans.

Cole discovers that a mental patient named Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt), whom he met in 1990, is an animal rights activist with a father (Christopher Plummer) whose laboratory may be harboring the deadly virus. Does Jeffrey want to unleash the virus, returning the earth to the animals? Or does his father, or another member of the team . . .

All of this is just the plumbing of the plot. What the movie is really about is its vision. The decor looks cobbled together from the debris of the 20th century. Cities are either scabby Skid Rows or towering skyscrapers. Scientists still work in laboratories that look like old postcards of Thomas Edison inventing. Bizarre killers and villains are hurled at Cole and Railly, and there are many bloody fights. Gradually the psychiatrist comes to believe, after Cole makes a series of accurate predictions, that he may be from the future after all.

The movie is not, however, a straightforward action thriller.

Much of the interest comes from the nature of the Cole character. He is simple, confused, badly informed, exhausted and shot through with feelings of betrayal. Nothing is as it seems - not in his future world, not in 1990 and not in 1996. And there is another factor, one hinted at in the opening shot of the movie and confirmed in the closing: He may have already witnessed the end of the story.

The plot of "12 Monkeys," if you follow it closely, involves a time travel paradox. Almost all time travel movies do. But who cares? What's good about the film is the way Gilliam, his actors and his craftsmen create a universe that is contained within 130 minutes.

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