Twelve Monkeys (1995)
- Before Bruce Willis was cast, several major A-list stars turned down the lead role because they felt the script was too risky.
- Many of the practical effects used in the climax were achieved without any CGI.
- Terry Gilliam originally wanted a completely different ending for the film, but test audiences preferred the one we see today.
Twelve Monkeys is a 1995 American science fiction thriller directed by Terry Gilliam, inspired by Chris Marker's 1962 short film La Jetรฉe. 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 โ 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 โ in which Cole keeps returning to the same mysterious airport memory โ 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.
