An excellent sci-fi film that deserves our attention.
I didn't really know what to expect when this movie was on TV very recently, but I was really glued to the set until the end thanks to a truly absorbing story and a collection of great actors who do a great job. I don't know director Terry Gilliam very well, I've only seen one or two of his films so far (not counting this film), but I'm beginning to understand his aesthetic a bit. However, I recognize that surrealism, of which the director is adept, and the bizarre script can really make it difficult to understand the work.
The film begins by immersing us in a profoundly dystopian world, where humanity was almost extinct by a pandemic. As the disease comes from an airborne virus that was deliberately released, the survivors moved into underground shelters. Technology, however, has evolved and allows the sending of chrononauts (that is, time travelers) to the past, in order to obtain pure samples of the virus, which can be used in the manufacture of a vaccine or medicine.
This is how James Cole, a criminal, is chosen for time travel in exchange for his crimes being forgiven. His mission is not to alter the past by preventing the release of the virus, even if he seems to want to. The mission is to locate those responsible and pass on all the information to the future, in order to send another agent who will collect the samples. But he only knows that a radicalized environmentalist group, the Army of the Twelve Monkeys, was responsible. Sent by accident to 1990 (instead of 1996), he ends up in an insane asylum where he will befriend the manic Jeffrey Goines and endear Dr. Railly.
The film deals with very complex themes, such as time travel, temporal paradoxes, the impossibility of changing the past, and even madness, the tenuous difference between reality and imagination, or between sanity and insanity. It has several advances and retreats in time and you have to be attentive, but what intrigues viewers the most is its ending, strangely sudden and confusing. I understood it quite well, and I think you just need to pay attention to the film to understand everything, but I'll leave a clue to help: the eyes of the protagonist and the eyes of the child that we see at the end of the film are exactly the same, and the what she sees coincides perfectly with a recurring dream that torments the protagonist, coming from the future. I say no more.
I loved Brad Pitt's performance in this movie. The actor, very used to heartthrob roles where he can use and abuse his natural charm, is almost unrecognizable here. Of course, younger and less experienced, but just as impeccable. I don't know to what extent participating in this film had an influence on his learning as an actor, but I believe it was useful for Pitt. Bruce Willis is also an actor who deserves a positive mention for his work here. He really seems confused, and in many scenes he manages to give the character the feeling that she is abandoning herself to the course of events, fighting against it whenever she feels her mission is in danger. Madeleine Stowe's performance was not so happy: while being frankly positive, it is the least interesting and the most conventional.
Technically, the film is flawless. Gilliam cleverly takes advantage of the sets and costumes and makes a truly strange, bizarre future, with those plastic protective suits and that ball in the interrogation scenes. It's an ugly world that we don't want to see one day. I especially liked the cinematography, and the way the director works the footage in a way that makes everything even more surreal and strange. For example, the scene on the staircase of Goines' father's mansion, which is as elegant and majestic as it is labyrinthine and dreamlike. In addition to the good effects, the film also has a very effective soundtrack.