Trying to Save the Future, Which Is the Past

Rating: 10/10 (29 July 2005)

Stories about the possibility of a post-apocalyptic future have been around for ages, since the very creation of science-fiction as a genre per se. The fact that today's society is responsible for what may become of the future in the near tomorrow, and that our own abuses and refusals to see what is right before out eyes are at the very center of all of these stories, whether they are good or bad.
Terry Gilliam of course is a natural for this kind of film. He gives the movie a decadent feel throughout, showing a society run ragged by its own excesses and bringing forth the a sense of imminent tragedy despite having moments of comedy. His world, the world in which TWELVE MONKEYS transpires, is a place where the mad run wild, where cities are collapsing in filth and neglect, where everything reeks of foreboding despite the luminosity of the opening sequence, where madness looms at every corner. This is a very dark movie, but his very best, most linear (despite the plot twists which hold up under examination), and one which gets better with repeated viewings.
A tragic event in which a deadly virus was unleashed onto humanity in 1996 and thus led to the extermination of Life On The Planet As We Have Known It leads to scientists of the future to try and make amends to change humanity's fate on the Earth by employing renegade citizens -- the scum of the Earth -- as guinea pigs to go back in time, among them one James Cole (underplayed to great effect by Bruce Willis). Cole could be any person. We don't know anything about him, but in a way, that doesn't matter since he is little more than one of many expendable volunteers and hints of his character sneak in later as he gets closer to fulfilling his mission. What we do know is that he is a man who dreams, and his dreams may have been reality: he may have already been at the scene of the Event of 1996.
It's this constant sense of deja vu that keeps popping up throughout the movie. When taken to a mental ward by mistake in 1990 he meets Jeffrey Goines (spastically played by Brad Pitt, Oscar-nominated here) who frantically spews forth talk about doom and destruction, and later Cole believes he has seen Goines in his recurring dream as a man pushing a boy aside while escaping... what? He doesn't know. Later he meets a psychologist, Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe), and one of her first reactions to him is that he's insane, and that she's seen him before. This becomes a running notion throughout her participation in this story from passive/resistant to active and even slightly crazy believer that Something Terrible is coming This Way, especially when she meets him six years later: she has seen Cole before. At the same time, Cole continues talking about a dream he keeps having in which she also plays a part as a blonde woman running down the aisle, screaming for help, after shots have rung out and a particular red-headed man in a ponytail (Jeffrey Goines?) has apparently escaped, not before pushing the little boy who is an innocent bystander. The questions arise: have these events happened? Are they going to happen? Who is really a part of this, or better yet -- is everyone, down to the smallest player, a part of a Greater Plot? Or is this all some trick in the fabric of time in which Time in itself is one huge conveyor belt showing repetitions of fragments of events that slide by over and over again?
These questions are formulated in a masterful sequence which includes key scenes of Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece VERTIGO in which Madeleine Elster/Judy Barton mourns her own brief existence ("You took no notice," she says, as Cole and Railly watch from their seats in the movie theatre they are hiding in). Snippets of dialog from VERTIGO form a foil to the dialog between Railly and Cole and later, when Cole awakens from having apparently dozed off in the theatre and goes looking for Railly, he comes face-to-face with her in disguise (looking almost exactly like Eva Maria Saint from NORTH BY NORTHWEST) as the swelling Bernard Herrmann score plays the emergence of Judy Barton, dressed as Madeleine Elster. It's a fascinating sequence, more so because of the most improbable occurrence of the names of the actors in both films: Madeleine Stowe plays Kathryn Railly who dons a blond wig and grey trench-coat and calls herself "Judy Simmons" while helping an "insane" man named James Cole; James Stewart plays a detective who tries to help "insane" Madeleine Elster who will later re-appear not once, but twice, first as brunette Judy Barton, and later, as Madeleine. Action and re-enaction, play and re-play.