12 Monkeys: Bruce's Underrated Scifi Flick

Bruce Willis's starring in 12 Monkeys is a tremendous leap from the typical movies made by the action star. Though there was plenty of violence in this flick, 12 Monkeys is a drama meant for deep thought. Set in a couple of different times, the future, the present, and the past, this movie illustrates a man's journey through time. The main character is a convict of the future-world and is sent through time like a lab-rat in order to gather medical information in the past in an attempt to cure the world's most deadly disease.

Problem is that time travel is not an exact science for future engineers. The prisoner, played by Bruce, is sent to a variety of locals, including the Dark Ages and the Great War. As time arrives into our modern age, a young psychologist lady comes into contact with the man as he is incarcerated in a mental institute. She tries to cure the man of his delusions of time travel and eventually believes the man after being reunited with him several years later.

Together the two attempt to not only find the origin of the disease, but attempt to put it to a halt. One suspect of the infectious culprit is a leader of a fanatical animal rights group. This individual is played by Brad Pitt, a character that comes into the contact with the time traveler in the mental institute all those years ago. As time passes, it is determined that this environmentalist is not the cause, though he did have a link to the culprit. Instead of stopping the culprit however, the protagonist is killed by law enforcements before he can complete the mission. This fate is foreshadowed in the opening of the film by a little boy's dream. This dream is none other than the memory of the time-traveler when he was a little boy, right before the outbreak of the disease.

This concept of time travel is that the passage of time is not only inflexible, but circular in nature. That going back in time will not change anything that has occurred in the past. The mere fact that time travel is possible does not mean that time traveling can change the essence of time. The protagonist has already traversed backwards through time at the beginning of the film and he is no different from everyone else in history. It's a concept of time travel that is rarely explored, but is quite intriguing. Very few flicks attempt to tackle such a scientific theory. The Terminator comes to mind, though they disprove the theory in the second film, and then merged the concepts of time travel in the third. Really the Terminator movies probably just made the concept confusing, but 12 Monkeys did an excellent job in exploring this realm of time travel.