A Life Through Film #009: 12 Monkeys
1996 begins with the best movie so far we've looked at so far in this series
Release Date: 12/29/1995
First Weekend At Number One: 1/5/1996
Weeks at Number One: 2
Thanks for reading! This is my ongoing series where I track the evolution of American culture in my life by reviewing every number one film at the weekend box office since I was born in chronological order. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading my introduction post here.
In 1962, French photographer and filmmaker Chris Marker released his landmark short film La Jetée. Primarily using still black and white frames as visuals and poetic narration as audio, Marker’s piece tells the story of a man out of time.
Living in an underground society beneath the ruins of post-apocalyptic Paris sometime in the future, our protagonist is found to have a great aptitude for time travel, thanks to his intense focus on a pre-apocalypse childhood memory of a woman standing on the titular jetty of Orly airport and watching a man being murdered. The hero is sent back in time to find information that could help his present, only to find the woman from his memory and fall in love with her.
La Jetée is a fascinating work, the kind of art film you might stumble into a screening of while roaming the exhibits of a metropolitan modern art museum. The use of photography to tell the story reflects its themes of memory and escaping into it. We create these snapshots of the past in our mind, but no matter how often we bask in these memories and want to escape into them, they aren’t perfect. They can never be perfect recreations of what actually happened. The past is always heartbreakingly past.
There is one shot of moving footage in La Jetée. About halfway through the 27 minute long film, we see our protagonist’s lover open her eyes from a restful slumber and stare happily into the camera from her cozy bed. Our main character’s trips to the past, into the memory of what humanity used to be, are becoming more real to him than his own nightmarish present. He’s desperate to escape into the perfection of world as it used to be, but it's a fool's errand of course. We cannot escape our reality by living in a dream.
La Jetée is a fantastic short film, the kind that will linger with you for a while after you watch it as a memory of your own. The whole thing is available online and would take less than a half hour of your time. I highly recommend watching it [it’s a 4.5/5 for me].
La Jetée never saw much wide attention outside of French New Wave circles in the early ‘60s, an exciting and important time. But as a festival staple and art piece, the movie found many adoring fans in the years since its release. In 2012, BFI named it the 50th best film of all time, ranking it higher than classic feature length films like Chinatown [4/5] and Raging Bull. In 2010, TIME Magazine named it one of the 10 best time travel movies ever made.
One fan of La Jetée was Hollywood producer Robert Kosberg. Perhaps inspired by the then-recent success of the Terminator films, Kosberg went to his friend, fellow producer Charles Roven, and showed him this inspired short about a man who travels back in time from a ruined future.
[By 1995, only two films in the now-convoluted Terminator franchise existed. 1984’s The Terminator is a 4/5, and Terminator 2: Judgment Day from ‘91 is a 5/5.]
Roven loved La Jetée and saw the potential for a modern full-length adaptation. So did Universal Pictures, who agreed to pay for a commissioned script for the project after he pitched them on it. Roven went to screenwriting couple David and Janet Peoples, who as a duo were Oscar-nominated for writing the Robert Oppenheimer documentary The Day After Trinity. As a solo writer, David Peoples also had credits on the scripts for Blade Runner [3/5] and Unforgiven.
The Peoples were conscious of wanting to make sure their movie stood apart from Terminator while also staying true to the source material they were adapting. They needed a way for their script to stand out. What they came up with was a huge twist on the formula of time travel stories. Drawing on their mutual experience working in a mental hospital, the Peoples imagined a story where it’s never actually clear to the audience if the main character is actually from the future or just suffering from schizophrenic illusions.
With this, the thematic focus of the story shifted. The plot was no longer a reflection on memory, but instead an interrogation of reality and our perception of it. If you know something to be the truth but everyone around you tells you that you’re wrong, who’s right? As Brad Pitt’s character, Jeffrey Goines, says in the movie:
There’s no right, there’s no wrong, there’s only popular opinion.
There were other changes as well from La Jetée to the new script. Inspired by news stories on animal testing and the viral disease labs, the movie gained an environmentalist angle, the villains now misanthropic animal rights activists willing to take their beliefs to apocalyptic extremes. This group, responsible for the viral apocalypse of the film’s version of 1996, would come to be named The Army of the 12 Monkeys.
Charles Roven loved the direction of the story, but was worried they wouldn’t be able to find a director who could adequately tell such a strange tale. Thankfully, a highly qualified director found the opportunity by chance. While they were rewriting their early drafts of 12 Monkeys, the Peoples happened to run into Terry Gilliam and were able to regale him about the cool new script they were working on.
I was your average white eleven-year-old boy at one point, so the works of Monty Python have loomed large in my mind for many years. As a founding member of the Pythons (as well as the only American in the legendary comedy troupe), Terry Gilliam was a vital figure behind the scenes of some all time great comedies. When you get your start as a film director by co-directing Monty Python and the Holy Grail [4.5/5], you’re already well on your way to having an extremely peculiar career.
Gilliam went on to have both character roles in front of the camera and creative ones behind it for both Life of Brian [3.5/5] and Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life [4/5], but eventually went solo as a director. From 1977 to 1985, he wrote and directed three fantastical films: Jabberwocky, Time Bandits, and Brazil. Time Bandits ended up being the biggest commercial hit of those three (and actually just got a remake/reboot), but the dystopian fever dream Brazil is the most oft cited as a classic. It also ended up being a big part of Gilliam’s reputation as a difficult creative for the studios to work with.
The director had made Brazil for Universal Pictures, who had secretly put together their own edit of the movie and changed the ending to make it less of a downer without consulting Gilliam. Outraged, Terry called them out with a full page ad in Variety for not releasing his movie and organized private, technically illegal screenings of his cut of Brazil to LA film critics. When these critics started nominating Gilliam’s version of the movie for various awards, Universal acquiesced and released the director’s cut to a wide audience. The movie ended up bombing at the box office, despite strong reviews.
Gilliam’s next movie, 1988’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, did even worse commercially. The adventure comedy pulled in just $8 million on a $46 million budget, again in spite of strong reviews around release. After this, no studio was willing to front Gilliam the money for his original ideas, which always ended up being over the top fantasies that required huge scope and ever ballooning budgets.
It seemed Gilliam was tired of making those kinds of movies too, claiming in a 2000 episode of The Directors that he wanted to strip back his work from the big budgets, which is how he ended up making The Fisher King in 1993 (though later he wrote that he was only offered the job so the studio could lure in his friend Robin Williams to star). The success of The Fisher King surprised many, since it was Gilliam’s first time directing a big studio film using a script he had no hand in writing. It paid off though, as The Fisher King was a moderate success, becoming Gilliam’s first profitable film in years.
When Gilliam ran into the Peoples after this recent success, he had never seen La Jetée, but loved the concept of their 12 Monkeys script and told them to send him a finished draft when they were done. He was very clear though: he wouldn’t be able to direct it. After all, he was getting ready to direct an adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities starring Mel Gibson. Sounds like an interesting project, Terry!
However, by the time the final draft of 12 Monkeys found its way to Gilliam, his version of A Tale of Two Cities was dead in the water. Gibson had left the project to direct and star in his own historical tale, something called Braveheart, leaving the former Python without a movie to make. Though he usually preferred working on his own scripts, he loved the concept of 12 Monkeys enough to sign on, even though it meant working with old foe Universal Pictures.
The studio claimed to be more amenable to Gilliam’s auteur style and editorial privilege this time around, granting him final cut of 12 Monkeys before a single scene had been filmed. That came with a strict expectation on production time though, and an even stricter budget. Despite having the ambitions of a big budget science fiction film, 12 Monkeys only had a budget of $29 million, far lower than comparable films of the time. For instance: Terminator 2 cost more than three times that to make a few years prior.
The crew of 12 Monkeys did everything they could to save money. The film didn’t use any expensive soundstages, instead filming scenes on location or in custom built sets in dilapidated warehouses and power plants around Philadelphia and Baltimore. Even the time machine at the center of the film is just a repurposed turbine in one of those power plants, dolled up a little to make it seem a bit more science-y. Though the intent behind this location strategy was primarily economic, it also works as a nice piece of metatextual storytelling. The ruins of the future are made from the materials as our own modern day ruins. We are not immune from collapse; in fact, collapse is already happening all around us. Sometimes budgetary restraint can lead to storytelling magic; the one shot of moving footage in La Jetée was all they could afford to have, so they made it count.
As far as saving money goes, they also got lucky with casting. Bruce Willis was a major star at this point, but he took a much lower rate for the lead role for the chance to work with Terry Gilliam. Madeleine Stowe had met Gilliam back when he was casting for his Tale of Two Cities movie, and though she wasn’t cast for that failed project, the director loved her acting ability and brought her onboard to 12 Monkeys as the female lead. Then there’s Brad Pitt.
Pitt’s been in this column already for his co-leading role in Se7en, but by the time he was cast in 12 Monkeys, that movie’s release was still months and months out. Legends of the Fall and Interview With a Vampire, the movies that made America fall in love with the actor, had also not been released in theaters yet. Pitt signed onto 12 Monkeys as the movie’s villain and right before shooting started, Interview With A Vampire hit theaters. One of the film’s biggest roles was now being played by one of the most in-demand actors in America.
Normally it takes me a lot of time to research these columns. Finding sources, quoting interviews, analyzing stuff between the lines, that sort of thing. Thankfully, Terry made it easy for me this time. Gilliam was excited to make 12 Monkeys but still didn’t trust the studio a decade after the Brazil debacle. As a way to ensure “witnesses” to any potential wrongdoing on the part of Universal, the director enlisted a couple of Temple University grad students to follow him around with cameras during the making of the movie. These guys, Louis Pepe and Keith Fulton, later compiled that footage into the feature length documentary The Hamster Factor [3/5 I guess?]. Between that and an excellent Ringer piece from early 2021 cataloging the history of the movie, I was able to spend less time finding sources on the making of 12 Monkeys and more time thinking about the movie instead.
When I first watched 12 Monkeys years ago, I never doubted that James Cole (Willis) was a time traveler. I was in high school I think, so I felt more comfortable trusting all the information fed to me by the movie. After all, they show you the subterranean dystopia he comes from right away. Case closed!
This time around, I found myself doubting everything about Cole’s story, despite already knowing the somewhat-conclusive ending. The movie does a fantastic job of offering evidence that constantly keeps you guessing. Cole is able to predict the outcome of an ongoing news story because he remembered hearing about it as a kid. Except maybe he had just seen a TV show with a similar premise and confused it with reality. He loves the music of the 20th century, but has no means to listen to it in his present. Does he remember it from when he was a kid? Or has he just created the fantasy of being from the future?
Without those scenes depicting what is either the future or his delusional fantasy, Cole comes across as an obvious paranoid schizophrenic because of his behavior. He treats the past not as a fluid, real place, but as a doomed diorama, and he lets everyone he meets know it. His mission recalls the thematic through line of La Jetée; to him, the 1990’s are a memory of something that has already happened, even as he speaks to and forms connections with people he says are already dead.
Willis was one of the biggest action stars of this era, but he plays James Cole in a way that eschews any memory of Die Hard [4/5, not a Christmas movie]. His anger is quick and sudden, almost always in a panic. He has every aptitude necessary to make an excellent time traveler except for a dangerous antisocial streak. And yet you can’t help but feel for the guy, no matter which way you interpret the story. If he’s a time traveler, his plan constantly goes horribly awry. If he’s schizophrenic, his life is a nightmare of constant fear and uncertainty.
Cole is a character capable of violence to accomplish his mission, but it’s not depicted with the slick fight choreography of Willis’s other films. After killing a couple of men in defense of himself and Dr. Railly (Stowe) later in the movie, Cole is intensely distraught and frightened. He is a man too disturbed by the collapse of his reality to ever consider a cool one-liner.
Brad Pitt as Jeffrey Goines, in contrast, is extremely confident in his reality. From the moment we meet him in the mental hospital in 1990, he’s got it all figured out. Most of the people locked up in there with him aren’t actually mentally ill, they’ve just rejected the consumer role forced on them by our post-industrial society. Already he’s framing himself as a revolutionary, despite still demanding if people know who his father is amid chaotic tantrums.
Pitt’s 12 Monkeys performance is out of this world. The actor studied extreme cases of mania firsthand for weeks before coming to set to better understand the body language and speech patterns necessary to sell the part. Goines is chaos incarnate, every wild gesture of his hands feeling like a strike against an invisible enemy. He’ll get himself going on a topic and spiral into shouted monologue just because he’s so worked up over it. The effect is frightening but extremely charismatic. You can totally buy how this man could organize a cult of personality around himself.
The intense introduction to Goines, the true-to-life decrepit nature of the mental hospital (filmed at Eastern State Penitentiary), and Gilliam’s trademark off-kilter cinematography all help to establish the central conflict of 12 Monkeys perfectly. This is not the story of a man trying to save the world, but rather of that man’s attempts to establish what is real and what is delusion.
James Cole isn’t the only character in the movie dealing with a collapsing sense of reality. In test screenings of 12 Monkeys, initial audiences didn’t buy the romance between Cole and his psychiatrist, Dr. Kathryn Railly. Going into my rewatch for this column, I was ready for that to be the weakest element of an excellent movie. Instead, I found myself fascinated by Railly’s own descent into madness as a response to the trauma she faces during the course of the movie.
Though she starts the movie a respected psychologist, Railly must descend into what others call madness in order to make sense of her ordeal. She’s kidnapped by a Cole, a dangerous mental patient and restrained by him in a hotel room. He then drags her to the most violent streets of Philadelphia, where she’s nearly assaulted before her would-be attacker is murdered right in front of her. Cole tells her over and over again that she and 5 billion other people are already dead. Dr. Railly’s mind is already in a tumultuous state when reality starts to truly collapse on her.
She pulls a bullet fired during World War I out of Cole’s leg. His predictions of the near future keep coming true. He keeps disappearing right in front of her eyes without a trace. Dr. Railly tries expressing these concerns to her fellow academics and they tell her she’s wrong, that her experiences aren’t correct. So she returns to the streets and seeks out Cole, her kidnapper, in order to find out if she’s crazy or not.
12 Monkeys is a movie about three people and their different reactions to a collapse in their reality. Cole rejects the idea of delusion, Railly eventually accepts being “crazy” if it means she’s right, and Goines attempts to make the world match his own disturbed vision. By the end of the second act, the Hitchcockian, neo-noir vibes are so palpable that Cole and Railly find themselves donning disguises while Vertigo plays to a nearly empty theater [I know everyone loves Vertigo but it’s a 3/5 for me]. As he watches Hitchcock’s classic, Cole stirs in discomfort as he wonders how the movie could possibly feel so familiar to him. “It’s just like what’s happening to us,” he says.
The movie never changes, it can’t change. But every time you see it, it seems different because you’re different. You see different things.
I won’t spoil it, but the final 10 minutes of 12 Monkeys is about as perfect an ending as a thriller can have. It’s twisting, shocking, tragic, and beautiful in equal parts. This ending is what lingered in my memory long after I watched the movie for the first time, and coming back to it again reaffirmed its insanely high quality to me. I would put it maybe just a tier below Se7en’s all-time great climax in terms of quality endings, but only just.
I think many people have found it it easy to go back and watch this movie with morbid curiosity after the COVID pandemic made the idea of an apocalyptic virus feel all the more palpable. But I don’t really see 12 Monkeys as a movie about disease in the same way that La Jetee isn’t a short about nuclear war. That’s a thing that happens in the movie that’s clearly bad, but I don’t think that’s what the movie is about. The movie is about perception, reality, truth, and paranoia. The viral apocalypse in the plot is more of a means to extrapolate those themes. That said, that element of the movie has (unfortunately) aged quite well. 12 Monkeys benefitted from a boost of popularity at the start of COVID lockdowns in 2020 as people tried to find connection to unprecedented times through existing art.
12 Monkeys did not invent the concept of the pandemic, of course. The fear of them and their potential devastation of civilization was a profound one in the ‘90s, when fears of nuclear war fell to the wayside a bit. Big movies had already tackled this phobia, including one just before the release of 12 Monkeys. Earlier in 1995, Outbreak had topped the box office for weeks with a story of a deadly virus threatening to spread and wipe humanity out. As Rita Kempley puts it in her review of 12 Monkeys for the Washington Post:
We're not afraid of holocausts wrought by computers or nuclear weapons; Ebola, AIDS and other emerging, rapidly mutating viruses have replaced those bugaboos in our nightmares.
On top of that, the movie also has Brad Pitt serving as a mouthpiece for Gen X malaise. His rants about not conforming to “crazy” societal norms and against consumerism aren’t too far off from the actor’s later performance as Tyler Durden in Fight Club, a movie that’s since become considered an essential examination of that generational discomfort. Despite 12 Monkeys being a movie about time travel, its appeal was perfectly suited for 1996.
In The Hamster Factor, Terry Gilliam said that he knew that 12 Monkeys would open well at the box office because of Willis and Pitt. After a very limited release to a handful of theaters at the very end of ‘95, the movie went wide at the start of 1996 and dominated a stale box office without any other new competition. Like Gilliam said, not too surprising.
The fact that such a strange movie continued to lead the box office for a second weekend with a whole crop of new movies to contend with is the real marker of it being something special to me. People will choose to pay money to see some real dogshit in the early parts of the year, but they didn’t this time. January is usually bereft of anything good at the movie theater, so to have something in that month with star power AND quality? That’s special.
12 Monkeys stayed in American theaters for about 4 months and ended up pulling in $50 million on that $29 million budget, a great result for releasing in the dump months at the start of every calendar year. Abroad though? Gilliam’s movie did true gangbusters, pulling in $100 million dollars across all international markets. With strong visuals and a story relevant to nearly anywhere on Earth, I’m not surprised the movie crushed overseas.
Reviews at the time were glowing. The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Empire Magazine, The Washington Post, Roger Ebert, and more all praised the movie’s inventive story, Gilliam’s imaginative creative vision, and the three main performances. Some critics, like Dennis Michael at CNN, didn’t enjoy the story or chaotic imagery as much, but the movie was still a critical hit in a time of the year when those could be hard to come by. It holds an 88% on Rotten Tomatoes, which matches its audience score as well.
Brad Pitt was nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the Academy Awards that year, losing out to Kevin Spacey for his role in The Usual Suspects. As much as I dislike Spacey these days and enjoy Pitt in 12 Monkeys, I can’t be too mad about that choice [The Usual Suspects is a 4.5/5].
As Brad Pitt and Bruce Willis continued onward to great success, Terry Gilliam never made a movie as big as 12 Monkeys ever again, at least commercially. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas has lived on culturally, and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is notable for being the final film role for Heath Ledger, but neither were a big hit at the box office. Gilliam’s output over the 21st century has remained a bit sparse. Based on The Hamster Factor though, I’m not sure if Gilliam minds so much that he doesn’t have to work on movies all the time; his perfectionist tendencies running counter to studio interests seems like it can create a miserable experience for everyone involved, himself included, even if the final product is this damn good.
As for 12 Monkeys, the movie has lived on as a scifi favorite for many, even inspiring a 4 season television adaptation in the late 2010s. As times feel more and more dire, and as reality continues to feel like it's collapsing all around us, the audience for 12 Monkeys only grows and grows.
After my first time watching 12 Monkeys, I felt a bit like the unnamed protagonist from La Jetée as I folded the memory of it over and over in my head for years afterward. In my recollection, it was excellent, but at some point I worried that if I returned to it more concretely by rewatching the film, the gulf between how it good it is and how good I remembered it being would be wide enough as to be devastating. I walk away from finally seeing this movie again and think it is somehow better than I remember.
I don’t think that this is a movie for everyone. 12 Monkeys doesn’t reward casual viewing with cool set pieces or funny one-liners. If you want a more rip-roaring time travel action movie, I can’t recommend Terminator 2 enough. But in an effort to differentiate 12 Monkeys from that franchise, the Peoples and Terry Gilliam crafted a movie that totally recalibrates our own expectations of reality and memory. I used to think that 12 Monkeys was excellent. Now, I believe that it’s extraordinary.
Rating: 5/5
Next Week: The concepts stay weird, but the execution gets dumber. We’re rocking From Dusk Till Dawn.
See you then!
-Will