Brilliantly Disorienting

Rating: 8/10 (31 January 2015)

This certainly isn't your average, run of the mill movie about time travel. It's a confusing and disorienting story that left me at least guessing for much of its run time about what actually was reality. The performance from Bruce Willis was wonderful. As James Cole, he plays a prisoner in a nightmar-ish future earth, where most of humanity has been wiped out by a virus, and the remainder have had to retreat underground. Cole is chosen to go back into the past to the point just before the plague erupted, not to prevent it - because you can't prevent what's already happened - but to bring a sample of the virus back to his time.
Willis did a marvellous job with this character. He is himself disoriented from the start (time travel isn't as easy as some movies make it out to be) and, making no sense to anyone he speaks to, he finds himself locked up in a mental institution.
It's in the mental institution that we meet the other two central characters: Dr. Raillis (Madeleine Stowe), who starts with the assumption that Cole is insane but gradually comes to believe his story, and Brad Pitt as Jeffrey Goines, the unbalanced son of a famous scientist who's central to how the virus is released.
What I really liked about this movie is that almost to the end, as a viewer I had some doubts about Cole: was he really from the future or was he delusional. That's finally answered, but it took a while and it was fun to speculate.
It's a well done movie, often chaotic and confusing and disorienting, which was actually a good way of getting the viewer into the head of Cole, who must have been feeling exactly the same way. (8/10)