Keeps you enthralled right through to the end, even if you have seen it before.

Rating: 9/10 (7 January 2012)

This movie is brilliant, and I would say as close to original as movies go, except that it was inspired by a 1965 French Short film called La Jetee. It is a tragedy in a sense, though you are not quite so sure how it is going to end, though you do suspect that it is going to end badly: it is just one of those films. However, throughout the film Cole (Bruce Willis) has visions of a man being shot at an airport and a blonde haired woman running to him. For the most part we do not meet a blonde haired woman, the only woman we get to know is a brown haired psychiatrist (Madaline Stowe).
It is now the future and six billion people have been killed by a virus and the rest of humanity has been driven underground. The interesting thing is that the animals are immune to this virus. Throughout the movie we are constantly referred back to the Army of the Twelve Monkeys and are informed that they will release the virus, yet how can an insane boy create, let alone steal, such a powerful virus that will wipe out humanity yet leave the plants and animals? This movie involves a lot of time travel, and the purpose of this is to get a sample of the virus so that humanity may inhabit the surface again. Cole believes that he must stop the virus from even beginning, but that was not his mission. He was never ordered to stop the virus, just to get hold of it. As is said, "it is all about following orders." The mission that Cole is on is not the mission he was sent on.
The time travel doesn't work fully. People are sent back in time but in most cases they do not get to the time they are supposed to. Cole, at first, is sent back to 1990 instead of 1996, and lands up in a mental hospital. This is very dark and dirty and really underlines the horror of humanity. Jeffery Goines (Brad Pitt) gives us a definition of insanity here, and that is not following what the majority follows. The world is a world of majority rules, and if you don't follow the majority then you are considered mentally ill. This is very true, just look around and see how minorities are treated. I remember a time (and it still is) when you were a geek if you used a computer.
The Cassandra Syndrome is brought up, and is connected with the prophets of doom that are appearing more and more rapidly the closer one gets to 1996. They are warning the world of the disease, the passage from Revelation where the angel pours the bowl of disease upon the world is read out a number of times, but nobody ever believes them. Nobody wants to believe that the world that they love is coming to an end. Yet belief and reality seem to play a very major part in this movie, especially around Cole. At the start he believes that the world will end and that his future is the present, but the more time he spends in 1996 and the more time he spends with Katherine Raily (Madeline Stowe), the more his sense of reality becomes twisted. The last time he visits the future, he enters it as a dream and returns to 1996 as reality. By the end of the movie, in Cole's mind, the whole virus is something that comes from the mouth of a mad man. Yet the more he tries to deny what is happening, the more the evidence piles up to prove to him that what is going to happen is true.
Erbert brings up the style of the movie and the scenes that it is filmed around. Almost everything in the movie is dirty, decaying, and falling apart. We catch glimpses of skyscrapers and the beauty of civilisation, but are brought into the reality of the slums and vagrants. The future is not something to look forward to, but rather something to shun, and the most important part is that it cannot be changed. Cole says "it is like a movie that you have already seen, you know what is going to happen, but every time you see it, you notice different things." So true, he realises that he knows what will happen, he has seen it, and he knows that even if he tries to stop it, it is only bringing him closer to his doom.
Twelve Monkeys is a movie that portrays the bleakness of the human existence. Though there are a few that live lives of luxury, to the majority, it is a bleak world falling closer to destruction. Cole says that he wants to make 1996 his reality, but as we look around at what Gilliam shows us, there is very little to distinguish it from his future. There is still a race of overseers and underlings, the virus just causes the balance of power to shift in another direction.