Terry Gilliam’s ‘90s Cult Classic Is A Once-In-A-Lifetime Sci-Fi Epic
“Wouldn’t it be great if I was crazy?”
Before there was River Song in Doctor Who and before there was The Time Traveler’s Wife, there was 12 Monkeys. Yes, the 1995 sci-fi thriller is known for its bleak take on the future, and the almost doggedly deterministic message that you (probably) can’t escape your own destiny. Jay Gatsby may have believed that you can’t repeat the past, but in Terry Gilliam’s time travel film, you also can’t change it.
Three decades ago, on December 29, 1995, Gilliam’s unique film 12 Monkeys hit theaters. Since then, it’s become a cult classic and even spawned an excellent, albeit very different, TV series. But what if we pretend we’ve never seen 12 Monkeys? What will we find when we watch it today? The short answer is that if you put the now-familiar paradox time travel tropes aside, the core of this movie is deeply humanistic and hopelessly romantic.
For those who may not remember, the premise of 12 Monkeys is almost too simple when described outright: Following a deadly global virus in the future, a prisoner named James Cole (Bruce Willis) is sent back in time from 2035 to gather data about the virus, in order to create a vaccine in the present. However, because this is a time-travel movie, things don’t go to plan, and Cole briefly ends up in WWI, as well as in 1990, before finally landing in 1996.
Along the way, he meets and falls in love with a psychiatrist named Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe). Early in the film, she assumes he is clinically insane, and in 1990 he’s briefly committed to a mental institution with certified wackjob, Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt). At the time of the film’s release, much was made about Pitt’s wonderfully over-the-top performance as Goines, but in retrospect, the true brilliance of the film is the dynamic between Stowe and Willis. What begins as a hostage situation, almost in the style of Pedro Almodóvar’s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, morphs into something more tender and strangely believable.
Madeleine Stowe’s return to 12 Monkeys in 2016.
After realizing that he only really wants to stay in the present, about midway through the film Cole attempts to convince Railly that he is nuts, and convince himself that the coming global catastrophe won’t ever happen. Retrospectives on 12 Monkeys often focus on Cole’s fractured reality and the idea that he has hallucinatory episodes. But the truth is, upon rewatching, 12 Monkeys is startlingly straightforward: Lovelorn time traveler decides he hates the future and desperately tries to figure out how to stay in 1996 with his one true love.
When the 2015 SyFy Channel version came about, Terry Matalas and Travis Fickett took the notion of a love story in 12 Monkeys and ran with it. And while Gilliam might never have approved of the 21st-century take on 12 Monkeys, both the film and the show contain similarly tragic romantic themes.
In rewatching the original film, now with the knowledge that Madeleine Stowe appears in 12 Monkeys Season 2, only makes the legacy of the film sweeter. And that’s because in all incarnations 12 Monkeys is about Cole and Railly.
The performances of Willis and Stowe in the original film are so electric, it makes you wonder if the pair could have done a rom-com together. Case in point: One of the funniest scenes in the movie occurs after Cole has come back to retrieve Railly from the trunk of a car, after failing to get any information from Goines at a fancy party. Cole is about to time travel, and they’re bickering about where he lost his handgun. In the middle of this, he mentions trying to talk to Goines, and she says, incredulously: “You went to a PARTY?” In an era in which closed-loop paradoxes are commonplace, moments like this are the true brilliance of 12 Monkeys.
Terry Gilliam directing Brad Pitt and Bruce Willis in 12 Monkeys.
The film also smartly uses the medium of cinema itself to make a statement about memory and the human condition. When Cole and Railly watch Hitchcock movies Vertigo and The Birds in a theater, Cole says: “It’s just like what’s happening to us... like the past... the movie never changes... It can’t change, but every time you see it, it seems different, because you’re different.”
This concept smartly insulates 12 Monkeys from ever feeling dated. It’s a movie about timelessness, fate, and love. And every time you watch it, you’ll see something new, making this tragic love story, oddly, uplifting.
