Holy shit!
A couple things I learned from some specials on the Sci Fi channel when 12 Monkeys came out:
Terry Gilliam chose Bruce Willis to take the part based on the phone call scene in Die Hard. It’s hard to remember that Willis was just an action star at this point, and putting him in an artsy sci fi movie was a pretty questionable move.
Brad Pitt desperately wanted to play this role and he was an up-and-comer, and seemed like a good fit. Then it turned out he had a very hard time talking fast enough to do the part. Some people just aren’t wired to be fast talkers. (Pitt is not Robert Downey, Jr.) He had to practice a lot to pull it off.
Also, Fisher King is a Gilliam movie that he didn’t write that came out before this, right? I watched it like crazy in high school, and 12 Monkeys was college…
Awesome, probably one of my top ten all time favorites and certainly one of the best sci-fi films. Have to give this one a listen.
I’m amazed anyone disagreed with Dingus over Willis’s being the best performance, especially if the alternative is Pitt’s. Of course it is. Pitt’s performance is fine for the character, I guess, but it’s just his usual ball of tics schtick (which I guess wasn’t so usual at that point). It’s not a good Pitt performance, and it’s nowhere near as interesting as what Willis is doing.
Best sci-if film ever made, imo. I pretty much despised everything Pitt-related prior to this.
Yeah I love this film. One of the few perfect ones.
I even enjoyed the TV show. It has none of the unique charm of the film, but is enjoyable time travel ride too.
Admittedly, I need to rewatch the whole thing. I plan to pick it up tomorrow, because, as discussed, this is minor Gilliam.
However, I always took the ending as more of a “She was so close.” irony thing.
It’s obvious she is a younger version of the “Astrophysicist” we see in the future and her dialog doesn’t point to her knowing who she is sitting next to. She’s more making a dispassionate observation. Her line is also “I’m in insurance.” further cementing that she really has no business running this experiment in the future.
I guess what I’m getting at is it feels more like she was right there at the epicenter without knowing it and shows she always had money and prestige, thus her later position.
Wow, I took a completely different viewpoint. His last phone call, where he didn’t think it went through? It went through and her quip that she’s insurance is because she’s there to take care of him in case Willis failed (because when they got the phone call, they had no idea whether was stopped, so she “was insurance” in case it still needed to be stopped.
In fact, I always loved that line, because they WERE able to stop him.
(But my minor quibble is when he’s going through security, they ask him to open up the vial, and he does, and I always wondered if that was the release of the pathogen).
I read it the way Tman did.
I’d say yes. Or at least that was always my take.
Btw, if you ever get a chance, 12 Monkeys is based on this - La Jetée - Wikipedia - and it is pretty amazing and worth a watch. Criterion has the rights, so you can get it on their streaming service. You used to be able to watch it on Hulu, but they split off a couple of years ago.
I thought maybe that back in 1995, the synopsis would have been called something like “SYNOPSIS OF THE 12 MONKEYS”
It’s readily available on youtube as well.
-xtien
“I don’t watch TV.”
That’s awesome. I love La Jetee
It’s French… bitch
To quote Queen, “No, no, no, no, no!”
Tom and Dingus had this same misconception, I don’t know where you guys are getting it from.
It’s stated several times in the movie that they cannot stop the plague, because it already happened. The whole point of sending Cole back into the past was to locate an original strain of the virus before it mutated in order to help create a cure, to cure it in the present so they can retake the surface of the planet. They say this so many times in the movie I don’t know how anyone could miss it. (Why having an original strain helps make a cure I don’t know, I’m not an epidemiologist.)
Furthermore, the bad guy (“Dr. Peters”, David Morse), opens the plague vial in the airport, exposing the inspector, himself, and everyone else. That’s it, guys, the plague just happened. Right there on the screen.
The scientist on the plane isn’t a younger version of the doctor from the future, that’s her, traveled back from the future to collect the original strain of the virus. She’s in Insurance. Insurance doesn’t prevent disasters, it just helps repair the damage afterward.
Really, the only thing that doesn’t make sense (to me), is why they send Jose to give Cole the gun. They know he can’t stop the plague (it already happened). So, as Dingus said in the podcast, the only thing that makes sense is that they know that, historically, Cole died in the airport that day, and they’re just “closing the loop”. But that doesn’t make much sense to me – the whole point is that they can’t change the past, no matter what they do, so why go through such machinations to “make sure” it happens “correctly”?
The only other explanation I can think of is that they’re punishing Cole for pulling out the tooth to try to prevent the scientists from pulling him back into the present. But that seems like a thin thread.
One other thing people question is, when Cole left his recording in the airport, that tells them that the 12 Monkeys didn’t do it, why don’t they get that recording until the 2035, or whatever year the present is? Well, that’s a bit of a plot contrivance, for sure, but they do say that it takes them time to reconstruct the recordings; the recording he made in the airport, and the one Katherine makes earlier, only get reconstructed when the plot requires it. The movie does explain that.
Oh, I definitely agree with you. Kellywand brought me around on this in real time while we talked about it on the podcast. As I mentioned, I think we’re conditioned by The Terminator to think she’s going to kill David Morse and save humanity. But as you point out, the plague has already been released and futhermore, the movie has already asserted several times that we’re not watching a James Cameron “change the past to save the future” movie.
But what is important to realize is that Cole succeeded. Not by averting the plague, but by finding the source of it.
-Tom
Ha! I’ve seen this movie at least five times and the ending has always confused me until now. You guys rock ☺
Upon re-reading my earlier comment, I didn’t mean I think they stopped him from spreading the virus. I mean they found the source as that’s the point of the movie - to find out where it started and to understand how to fix the current-day world. The “insurance” line, I thought, was retrieving a sample of the virus since Cole did not.
Another reason I always assumed they didn’t want to change the past is because they wouldn’t be in charge in the future.
My new question is why doesn’t Cole get infected by the plague if it’s released in the airport while he he’s there? Because he’s naturally immune/lucky? Or because Time and Death are all, “Look, we have you down here for gunshot wound.”
It IS confusing, though. The gun and the last phone call eat away at me, 'cause yeah, if she has time to get on the plane and EVEN KNOWS WHICH SEAT MORSE IS GOING TO SIT IN that far in advance, why’s Bruce have to die? If he and Stowe had gotten away, that would have been his loop. Maybe Gilliam’s point, as usual, is that life is a random series of idiotic events mismanaged by higher management, even when it comes to time travel.
Another thing: how do they in the future even figure out it’s Morse (and his plane seat number)? Bruce never learns this, and neither does Madeline. All he’s done is told them that graffiti he found earlier is pointless.