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My Review of "12 Monkeys"

A thought provoking movie about time and perception of others.

By Brian AnonymousPublished 3 years ago 5 min read
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12 Monkeys came out back in 1995 and still this movie holds strong today. There are a lot of outdated ways of storytelling and whatnot but for the most part it tells a pretty interesting story that will have you questioning yourself afterwards. It's been a while since I watched a more thought provoking movie and this was pretty relevant to today as it deals with a global pandemic in the future.

This movie starts out in the bleak future of 2035. There was some sort of virus spread to the world back in 1996 and ever since then humans have had to socially isolate underground because the air is no longer breathable. Our future selves are trying to figure out how to create a vaccine so that we can live on the surface of the earth again. Animals now rule earth as they're the only ones able to survive the illness.

We then cut to the main character James Cole. He's basically a prisoner due to his violent tendencies. Lucky for him he's got a strong mind and he pretty much has a photographic memory. One day the prison had "volunteered" him for a job to collect samples and information. Little did he know, it required him to travel back in time to the past.

Time travel isn't quite perfected so sometimes people will be teleported to the wrong date. So instead of the year 1996, James is teleported to the year 1990. Unsure of what was happening in conjunction with affects of time travel James immediately gets into trouble.

Obviously a strange man just showing up, attacking police officers and claiming he's from the year 2035, he's not going to be taken seriously. He's put into a mental institution and sedated with extremely strong doses of drugs. Fortunately or not fortunately for him he has a really understanding psychologist and a wacko cellmate that befriends him.

The first part of the movie allows us to follow James' experience at the mental institution. He's told that he's crazy repeatedly when he knows what he ahs to do must be done to save the earth. Then the movie starts to take a turn when he's able to escape and continue on with his assignment.

He starts to question himself as to what is real and what isn't. Is he actually crazy? Even if he wasn't crazy why would he want to live his life in the future as an inmate underground never being able to enjoy the beauty of the earth's surface? His mentally deranged friend in the mental institute also makes a case when he asks who the real crazy person is. Often if we look at the past we see people that were perceived as crazy but were actually pretty sane. The only thing that led to their labels was the fact that they were non-compliant with the social norms or social understanding of things.

This was a pretty deep analysis of what we consider normal or sane. How are we going to succeed as a species if we don't listen out to those that have a different perspective of the world? These perspectives may be totally out there but they're still worth a listen. Maybe we're preventing ourselves from advancing the human race because of our own egotistical thoughts?

As this movie also deals with time travel James' also starts to question whether things are predetermined or that we have our own fates in life. There are a number of circumstances that he falls into that make him think that maybe he's the one that may have something to do with the motivation of the release of the virus. Who knows if the butterfly effect of him exploring the past will have on the future?

There wasn't too much played with the concept of self determination though. I thought they could have done more with this but then again Bruce Willis who plays James played in the movie Looper that kind of talks about these theories.

This isn't the only career similarities I saw. James mentally ill friend is played by Brad Pitt and his character seemed quite similar to the character he played in the movie Fight Club that came out only a few years later. It's funny to notice these things when you watch back on these older movies.

So there's a ton of thought provoking questions and the movie is made quite artistically. They have an interesting musical score that played throughout the movie that gave this movie a creepy and yet confusing environment. The confusion continues with some of the camera angles they used to keep us off our equilibrium.

The director also repeated certain phrases and moments that would burn into our minds. These were sometimes used to foreshadow things to come or to give us a little misdirection to help us keep guessing.

I did have a small gripe about how some of the characters didn't think quite as rationally as a normal person would in their situations. James' irrational actions caused a lot of unnecessary situations in this movie.

The sound mixing in this movie are also really weird. I understand what they're doing by elevating the voices of the actors but sometimes it seemed as though some of the actors were doing voice-overs for themselves in the movie. At times it was like they were narrating themselves. Really odd feeling of the movie. Then again this was back in 1994 so the technology back then wasn't so great. You can tell this with some of the scenes in the future, especially with the time travel sequences.

Overall, I would say that this movie was quite entertaining. I like having questions to think about after watching a movie. It's just a shock that I didn't get to watch this until 2020 to appreciate it. I have to give this movie an 8 out of 10. It is definitely something you should put on your list of things to watch.

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About the Creator

Brian Anonymous

I have tons of opinions that change constantly. I watch a lot of movies and play video games. There are some articles on my struggles with languages and dance as well.

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