Terry Gilliam directs Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe and Brad Pitt in this time travel head fuck where a damaged man from a post-apocalyptic future travels back to the source date of the epidemic that forces humanity underground… and everyone treats him as if he is crazy… which he may well be.
Vertigo. La Jetée. The Terminator. The Last Battle. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. A winning mish-mash of sources and influences – some openly cited; others lurking in the back seat. Yet it coalesces beautifully and becomes its own thing. This contains one of those OTT early Brad Pitt performances that can be quite grating, twitching before he found his inner cool. If I can forgive it in Se7en, then I can forgive it here. When I was a teen 12M really affected me at the cinema. I struggled with its pacing the last time I watched it and took a 10 year break. Here we are now though and the salvaged production design and Willis and Stowe’s frantic but dialled back romance swung it back into “classic status”. It is imperfect but if you are in the right mood, all its tricks and twists and ambiguities are quite powerful. Spoiler: I’m pretty sure the female scientist who appears at the end in the coda scene is there to ensure the epidemic does happen and her future is assured rather than to be a back-up if Cole fails.
10
Perfect Double Bill: Happy Accidents (2000)
I write regular features about live comedy for British Comedy Guide here https://www.comedy.co.uk/people/bobby_carroll/features/
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 
The thought that she was there to let the pandemic happen is depressing. But then it might have been intentionally ambiguous to allow some sense of hope. I never believed in fixed futures. As time travel’s most ethical dilemma has fuelled our sci-fi for many decades, so has the notion that seeing the future should encourage our freedom to change it for the better. 12 Monkeys makes a bold statement about how inevitable some things might be like the fate of its anti-hero. But I can always respect Terry Gilliam for making audiences really think about his sci-if films in ways that have worked for 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner.
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