The ABC of CINEMA
12 Monkeys 15
USA | 1995 129 minutes
DIRECTED BY
Terry Gilliam
STARRINGBruce Willis | Madeleine Stowe | Brad Pitt
We've reached G for Gilliam in the ABC of Cinema, and this film stands as one of the most striking dystopian films of the 1990s. Adapted loosely from Chris Marker’s 1962 short film La Jetée, Gilliam transforms Marker’s haunting meditation on time and memory into a dense, paranoid narrative that remains unsettlingly prescient.
The film unfolds in a post-apocalyptic future where the remnants of humanity live underground after a virus has devastated the Earth’s population. James Cole (Bruce Willis), a convict, is sent back to the 1990s to gather intelligence on the supposed origins of the plague, but his mission quickly becomes entangled in questions of perception and reality. His encounters with psychiatrist Dr. Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe) and the anarchic Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt) destabilise any narrative certainty, leaving both Cole and the audience to wonder whether he is a time traveller or merely a madman caught in delusion.
Central to 12 Monkeys is the tension between memory and inevitability. Cole is haunted by recurring visions of a childhood scene at an airport, which Gilliam frames not only as personal trauma but as a metaphor for humanity’s cyclical inability to escape its own destructive impulses.
Gilliam’s visual style heightens the sense of claustrophobic inevitability. Wide-angle lenses distort faces and interiors, while industrial sets evoke a future cobbled together from the detritus of the present. This aesthetic compares with Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), in which bureaucracy, surveillance, and authoritarian structures reduce individuals to powerless figures in systems beyond their control.
Nearly three decades later, the film still speaks directly to contemporary fears with its vision of viral catastrophe, its critique of institutional authority, and its meditation on the fragility of memory.
10 November 2025 MONDAY 19:30
AUDITORIUM
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