Twelve Monkeys

Synopsis

Bruce Willis stars as James Cole, a convicted petty criminal of about a generation in the future, when a remnant of the human race lives in a sealed underground environment due to contamination of the surface world with a disease that killed off most of the human race in 1996. The movie takes its title from the fact that the disease is believed to have arisen as an act of bioterrorism by a mysterious group calling itself The Army of the Twelve Monkeys.

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As a convict, Cole is occasionally coerced into "volunteering" for dangerous missions to the surface in a biohazard suit, where he explores an abandoned Philadelphia for biological specimens (presumably as a source of information about the disease, which may lead to protections against it). Cole proves himself to be a careful observer with an excellent memory, and is therefore "volunteered" to participate in a more ambitious branch of the program.

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For the special program, the scientists of the future have developed a system for sending individuals, naked, on round trips to the past. Cole and others are sent into the past in order to track down the origin of the disease so that a scientist can be sent back to study it directly. After some unspecified amount of time in the past the time travellers simply disappear out of the past and re-appear in their own present, sick and badly disoriented.

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The time travel mechanism is not very reliable with respect to hitting the target date, and on a briefly portrayed trip Cole and one of his associates are sent all the way back to World War I, where Cole is shot in the leg, he and his friend are caught in a photograph, and his friend merits a minor footnote in history because of the French doctors' conclusion that he forgot French and retained English with an unrecognized dialect as the result of shell shock. The plot line also hints that other explorers were inadvertantly sent back as far as the Fourteenth Century.

Related Topics:
World War I - Shell shock

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The scientists try to send Cole back to October 1996, a few weeks before the outbreak of the disease, but on his first trip he lands in April of 1990 instead. He is arrested after a violent resistance that leaves the authorities believing that he is insane — not least because he claims to be a time traveller from a near future where the world has been transformed by disease. He is therefore institutionalized, placed under the care of psychiatrist Dr. Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe), and meets another institutional inmate named Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt).

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Goines, in addition to being seriously deranged, is an animal rights and anti-capitalist activist. The movie's extended portrayal of the encounter between Cole and Goines weaves Goines beliefs into the fabric of the film's treatment of disease and time travel.

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Goines helps Cole escape the ward were they are held, but he is quickly recaptured and placed in restraints in an isolation cell. While there he "disappears" back into the future, leaving the authorities baffled about his disappearance.

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Between 1990 and 1996 the psychiatrist, Kathryn Railly, takes an interest in prophets of doom who claim to be from the future and predict the destruction of the world by disease, and publishes a book on the topic. (We are left to assume that her interest was triggered by her encounter with Cole in 1990.)

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Cole's second trip to the past put him in the trenches during World War I, as mentioned above.

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On his third trip he arrives at the target date, about six weeks before the disease broke out during the Christmas season of 1996. Having found a poster announcing one of Railly's talks and book signing sessions, Cole kidnaps her to enlist her aid in his mission. She believes him to be delusional, but feels sympathy for him and begins to help him a little after he passes on some obvious opportunities to harm her.

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As the story unfolds, Cole is gradually convinced by Railly's arguments that he is merely delusional, but various events and evidence of the World War I episode described above cause her to begin to take him seriously. Ultimately they track down the Army of the Twelve Monkeys and report it to the scientists of the future via a voice mail message, which is recovered in the distant future and has the recurrent effect of causing Cole's mission to begin with.

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Cole, now in love with Railly and the open air of the pre-disease world, decides that he has done his duty and will stay in what he perceives as "the past" to enjoy it. At the last moment he puts together the actual cause of the disease, reports it in another voice mail message, and gets himself killed in an attempt to stop a man from carrying samples of the original virus onto an airplane. The story is brought to a full circle as the young Cole sees his future self shot dead at an airport.

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In a final scene one of the scientists is shown taking a seat on an airplane next to the man in posession of the original virus, and introducing herself as "in insurance". We are left to conclude that Cole's mission was a success, and provided some hope of salvation for the humanity of his era.

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There is also a strong suggestion that Cole had to die due to his decision to remain in his past, which is "not allowed", perhaps by the rules of the society that sent him, or perhaps by the laws of physics.

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