Twelve Monkeys

As humans, intelligent and sentiment beings that we are, entrusted with this earth that we live on, yet we plunder it and subjugate the creatures. A tragedy of the commons. But what seems to surpass that is our obsession to control. Going into this film pretty much blind, I was pleasantly surprised with the wealth of themes and the dystopian time travelling plot. The incorporation of time travel that seems to make use of David Lewis’ conception of time travel through four dimensionslism of persons, allowed for a coherent metaphysical basis for time travel into the past by protagonist James Cole (Bruce Willis). The ways James felt dissociated and not fully himself after all the time travelling elicited the idea of temporal slices or person stages due to being extended through time, and perhaps how it could have psychological side effects. It provided an interesting concretisation of Lewis’ theory visually. The entire causal loop created provided for a truly intriguing sci-fi thriller especially with the ending. Through themes like environmentalism, which was tied with the main plot, the inhumanity and ethics of humans subjugating animals and exploiting them as means for animal testing was challenged. Something I hope has improved lately. The influence of Hitchcock on this film is also quite apparent, with this film acting as a form of pastiche especially of Vertigo. Through James’ rough treatment of Dr. Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe) and the disguises that James and Kathryn put on in a screening of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, clearly transforming them into the Scottie and Madeleine. The scene from Vertigo when Scottie and Madeleine visit the Californian national park, reinforces the environmentalist themes. The precarious nature of the human life, while nature persists and subsists against harsh conditions, they adapt and seem to always find a way to survive. The transformation of Dr. Railly into a blonde, only reinforces the Hitchcockean influence, being a respected psychologist yet also somewhat a damsel in distress, at the mercy of the unstable of James and somehow falls for him, in a Stockholm syndrome manner, despite his violent domineering masculinity. This aspect is somewhat problematic. The overly generous usage of Dutch angles here is wild, yet very reflective of James’ growing dissociative state where different times has caused a state of delirium. Probably one of the best sci-fi films I’ve watched in a while, very enjoyable.