A thought-provoking but troubling time-travel story

Is the end of this movie really the beginning, or is the beginning of this movie really the end? Time travel stories have a peculiar contorted logic all their own, one which throws for a loop such normal logical concepts as cause and effect and chronological sequence. Linguists might need to add a few new tenses to supplement normal ones like Present Indicative, Past Tense, Future Tense, and even Pluperfect Subjunctive in order to allow people to adequately discuss this logic. But I'll do the best I can with normal English.

12 Monkeys is a hard-hitting, thought-provoking movie. However, one thing it is not is lighthearted entertainment. The tone is dark, menacing, and foreboding throughout the movie, whether it's in the dystopian future from which the protagonist James Cole (Bruce Willis) comes, or in the seedier parts of the late 20th-century America where he ends up. Director Terry Gilliam got his start with comedy team Monty Python, but there's nothing comical about the tone of this movie. If you want a time-travel movie from the upbeat side, watch the Back to the Future trilogy instead.

In the future, a plague has wiped out most of the human race and left the surface of the Earth uninhabitable. The survivors live in an underground bunker, controlled by an oppressive government made up of scientists who use scavenged remnants of technology for the purpose of social control. Cole is a prisoner (the exact details of his crime are never explained), and is being used by the scientist masters as a guinea pig for experiments and as a scavenger to retrieve things they want, first from the unhospitable surface of the Earth (where we see some eerie views of the ruins of downtown Philadelphia), then from the past via a time machine the scientists have just invented (but not quite perfected).

Cole's mission is to retrieve a sample of the pure form of the plague virus from the late 20th century, before it mutated into the more virulent form that wiped out most of humanity. Supposedly, this will allow the scientists to create an antidote and allow mankind to go back to the surface of the Earth. Also supposedly, the past is immutable and time travelers can't change anything, so trying to actually prevent the plague or warn people about it is futile. But neither Cole nor the moviegoer is given much confidence that this future government of scientists actually cares about the welfare of humanity, or is telling the truth about any of these "facts".

As the time machine is not very well "debugged", he gets sent to the wrong time on a few occasions before finally reaching the period just before the plague is unleashed. In one time trip, he is injured on a World War I battlefield. The cruel scientist rulers don't even treat these injuries before sending him on the next time-trip attempt, which lands a few years too early, leading him to be committed to an insane asylum in the early 1990s. There, he meets a few people who will prove important later in the movie, including a fellow inmate played by Brad Pitt who's raving about how the world would be better off without humans in it, and psychiatrist Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe) who actually listens to Cole's own somewhat incoherent ravings, unlike the other psychiatrists who just think he's a nutcase, and befriends him even though she doesn't actually believe his story about being from the future.

The future scientists eventually retrieve him and make yet another try at sending him to the correct time, and this time they succeed: he winds up just a few weeks before the plague is set to hit, around Christmas 1997. There, he decides, regardless of what the future government has told him, that he's going to try to prevent the plague. He finds and kidnaps Dr. Railly, who fights him at first but eventually believes his story after he's able to predict some news events that he vaguely remembers from his childhood. Cole was just a little child when the plague struck, but he remembers some things from the pre-plague world, including fresh air and 20th century pop music, which he greatly enjoys encountering again on his time trip. However, he also has a troubling but indistinct memory of something violent happening at an airport terminal, which keeps coming back in flashbacks.

His attempts to prevent the plague center on trying to track down a radical environmentalist group called the "12 Monkeys", to which some evidence points as the people responsible for unleashing the plague. In a wild chase, he tries to find them while eluding everyone from the local police (who regard him as a wanted kidnapper with a mental hospitalization record) to other time travelers sent by the future government to make sure Cole remains focused on his mission, which is exclusively to retrieve a sample of the virus, not to try to stop it. This chase brings him through some seedy places, in an apparent attempt by the filmmakers to illustrate that the 20th century wasn't always that much better than the ugly future of this movie.

Everything is all tied together by the end, including Cole's childhood flashback scene, but it's not a "happy ending" of the Hollywood sort. You'll come out of it still troubled, and with many questions. The movie-related newsgroups were buzzing for months after this movie came out with questions, comments, and speculations as to what it all meant.

It's a really good movie, but it's not for everybody. If you like to be challenged and troubled a little in the course of your entertainment, you'll like it, but if you want things to stay more on the pleasant side, there are plenty of other movies that will be better for you.