Twelve Monkeys (1995)

Most people think so. 84% of audiences gave it a thumbs up, by Google's archived audience score. Critics agree, scoring it 82%.

In the year 2035, convict James Cole reluctantly volunteers to be sent back in time to discover the origin of a deadly virus that wiped out nearly all of the earth's population and forced the survivors into underground communities. But when Cole is mistakenly sent to 1990 instead of 1996, he's arrested and locked up in a mental hospital. There he meets psychiatrist Dr. Kathryn Railly and the son of a famous virus expert who may hold the key to the Army of the 12 Monkeys; thought to be responsible for unleashing the killer disease. Wikipedia ↗

Twelve Monkeys is a 1995 American science fiction thriller directed by Terry Gilliam, inspired by Chris Marker's 1962 short film La Jetée. Bruce Willis stars as James Cole, a convict in a post-apocalyptic 2035 who is sent back in time to gather information about a deadly virus that wiped out five billion people in 1996, believed to have been released by a group called the Army of the Twelve Monkeys. Cole's time travel is imprecise — he arrives in 1990 instead of 1996 and is institutionalized as delusional, where he meets the manic Jeffrey Goines, played by Brad Pitt in an Academy Award-nominated performance of wild, twitchy energy, and psychiatrist Kathryn Railly, played by Madeleine Stowe, who gradually comes to believe Cole's story.

Terry Gilliam's paranoid, visually dense direction created a film that kept audiences genuinely uncertain whether Cole was a time traveler or simply insane, and the cyclical narrative structure — in which Cole keeps returning to the same mysterious airport memory — built to a devastating conclusion that retroactively revealed the story's cruel logic. Brad Pitt's uninhibited performance as the wealthy, institutionalized environmental activist Jeffrey Goines was a career-expanding turn that demonstrated his range beyond leading-man roles. Twelve Monkeys earned $168 million worldwide on a $29 million budget and has been recognized as one of the most intelligent science fiction films of the 1990s.