12 Monkeys is one of those rare films that manages to mix a huge load of ideas, themes and different genres into one production and actually have it all work brilliantly.
It also manages to have an even more unusual quality - and that is that the film gets better every time you see it and absorb more of the plot.
The story primarily concerns a disasterous global event, and the run up to it. In the near future, all but 1% of Earth's population has been wiped out by a terrible virus. The remnants of humanity live in underground settlements that are a bizarre mix of high tech gear and dirty metal walls.
The main character, James Cole (Bruce Willis) is a convict in the future. He is "volunteered" for tasks to aid humanity in order to apparently reduce the prison sentence he serves, though when we get to see him we gain the impression from his personality that whatever crimes he committed are quite far in the past.
The entire film is pretty ambiguous from start to finish, which is what makes it so fun to watch. One of the huge musings through the whole film is on the nature of sanity.
Cole's primary mission (other than a fabulously creepy data-collecting trip to the surface in a vacuum suit early on) is to use an apparently new technology - time travel - to go back to the time of the outbreak, 1996, and find out what caused it.
Instead, he ends up in 1990 by mistake, and is quickly put in a mental institution for his gibberings about the future. Here he meets Goines (Brad Pitt), another mental patient who hates consumerism and apparently is obsessed with animals "taking back the world". Goines naturally goes on Cole's list as a candidate for "plague causer", whether founded or not is hard to tell.
Pitt is often, like DiCaprio, exemplified as a "pretty face" actor. Here, however, he pretty much gives the top performance of the film.
Goines is poetic, twistedly logical and yet utterly insane. He'll typically start talking about his ideas to Cole and then get "agitated", spilling out a torrent of anti-establishment jargon while Cole watches with weary confusion. He contributes considerably to the film's disorienting tone with his incongruous witterings yet solid sentiment.
One of the best speeches of the film comes from a man (Frederick Strother) who inexplicably realises he is not sane. Dressed in a smart dinner jacket, he approaches Cole and leans towards him.
"I find myself on the planet Ogo, part of an intellectual elite, preparing to subjugate the barbarian hordes on Pluto. But even though this is a totally convincing reality for me in every way, nevertheless Ogo is actually a construct of my psyche. I am mentally divergent, in that I am escaping certain unnamed realities that plague my life here. When I stop going there, I will be well. Are you also divergent, friend?"
And is he?
Most interesting about this speech is the use of "plague" and "unnamed realities", two things that strike an enormous resemblance with Cole's 'reality'.
This question of sanity bothers us all through the film. Cole hears voices that apparently come from his head (though the voice mockingly identifies itself as another convict sent back in time). The moods of the scientists in the future change every time he sees them - at one point they are interrogating him almost cruelly and berate his lack of success, at another they encourage him as though admiring his courage and resourcefulness.
The system of time travel itself seems almost arbitrary - at one point he ends up in WWI. Does this suggest that he's imagining it, and his chaotic mind flits from one "time" to another?
Is the "virus" scenario just Cole's personal "Planet Ogo"? Is he "mentally divergent"?
These questions are answered to some extent, but left to our own minds predominantly.
The story itself features a neat twist and I just love the ending. It's very sad but also hopeful. It leaves so much open for us to think about, that even though you don't know the exact conclusion to the story, you'll be thinking about each possible outcome for days after the credits have rolled.
5/5.
[*][*][*][*][*]
No comments:
Post a Comment