12 Monkeys (1995) Directed by Terry Gilliam. Written by David and Janet Peoples, based on the Chris Marker film La Jetée (1962). Starring Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, and Brad Pitt.
Let’s time travel back to the early 1990s in the U.S. Let’s say, oh, about 1992.
The Soviet Union has just dissolved. Silence of the Lambs wins Best Picture. Rage Against the Machine releases their first album. The Satanic Panic is going strong, as is the so-called War on Drugs, and little tween me is having nightmares about crackheads and Satanists. (I was a very anxious child.)
The era of 24-hour cable news is fully underway, mostly thanks to the 1990-1991 Gulf War. In April, riots break out in Los Angeles in response to the acquittal of four LAPD officers who had been videotaped beating Rodney King, a Black man, while they were arresting him. A few months later the FBI shoots and kills a 14-year-old boy, his pet dog, and his mother—who was holding her infant child in her arms at the time—during an armed standoff at Ruby Ridge, Idaho.
Voters boot George H.W. Bush in favor of Bill Clinton in the presidential election. AIDS is the number one cause of death among young American men.
And in October, writer Richard Preston published an article in The New Yorker called “Crisis in the Hot Zone,” in which he describes, in gruesome and arresting detail, the 1989 outbreak of Ebola virus among macaques at a medical supply company in Reston, Virginia.
While strains of Ebola have a human mortality rate of nearly 90% and are known for quickly wiping out the caretakers, medical staff, and scientists, it turned out that the version of Ebola carried by the monkeys from the Philippines to Virginia was not harmful to humans. A handful of people involved in the outbreak were found to have developed antibodies to the virus, indicating they been infected, but no humans got sick or died, and none passed it on to anybody who hadn’t had direct contact with the monkeys.
But the news of the outbreak, and how much worse it could have been, hit the American news like a shockwave. The reaction only intensified after Preston turned his article into the book The Hot Zone (1994), which is one of those rare non-fiction books that profoundly reshapes the way an entire society thinks about a particular danger.
It wasn’t a new fear: the HIV/AIDS epidemic was at its height. In 1994 it became the leading cause of death among all Americans aged 25-40. The number of people in the United States becoming infected with and dying from AIDS would decline sharply in the latter half of the ’90s, but before that happened there were a lot of predictions—such as the one in Preston’s “Hot Zone” article—that HIV would mutate into a virus that spread much more easily, perhaps even become airborne like flu viruses, and it would become unstoppable.
Naturally, viruses made it into the movies as well. Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia came out in 1993; it was among the first mainstream Hollywood movies to deal directly with the AIDS epidemic. The Hot Zone was optioned for film, but it was taken out of production when Wolfgang Peterson’s Outbreak (1995) beat it to the punch.
On the heels of those movies came 12 Monkeys. It wasn’t conceived as a plague story, but the way it evolved into one makes a lot of sense given the time period. The idea for the film came from a man named Robert Kosberg, who is known as a Hollywood guy who makes his living by selling pitches to studios. Kosberg loved Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), so he approached producer Charles Roven at Universal to take it on. Roven had made a handful of not-very-great films over the previous decade, but he is a bit more well-known now, on account of being the producer behind Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, many of the DC superhero movies, and Oppenheimer (2023).
Roven brought on David and Janet Peoples (a married couple) to write the screenplay for a possible La Jetée remake. David Peoples was one of the screenwriters on Blade Runner (1982), and he also wrote Ladyhawke (1985) and the much-lauded Clint Eastwood western Unforgiven (1992). The Peoples watched La Jetée, but they balked at the idea of remaking what they thought was a perfect film. Roven convinced them to give it a try anyway. They were particularly resistant to the idea of combining time travel with a nuclear apocalypse, because James Cameron had just done that—and done it extremely well—with Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991).
So they looked around to brainstorm a new idea. It just so happened that where they were looking around was their neighborhood in Berkeley, adjacent to the University of California campus that has long been a focal point of a great many political protests, including protests about environmentalism and animal rights. The microbiology labs nearby got them thinking about man-made germs. They repurposed the character of a bumbling ecoterrorist from an old script of Janet’s, called on their shared memories of working in state mental hospitals in their younger, pre-Hollywood days, and the plot of 12 Monkeys was born.
Roven and the Peoples then had to convince Chris Marker to sell the remake rights to La Jetée. This apparently not an easy task, as Marker had no interest in working with Hollywood and very little patience for all the schmoozing and legalities involved, but the Peoples took Marker out for dinner with mutual friend Francis Ford Coppola, who convinced Marker to let them make their movie.
Roven started to look around for a director, and the combination of “time travel” plus “weird bleak future” plus “nonlinear narrative” led him to seek out Terry Gilliam. Gilliam had famously clashed with Universal Pictures while making Brazil (1985) a decade earlier, and he had acquired a reputation for being a difficult, expensive director to work with—which was the last thing Universal wanted, because this is the same time when they were making Waterworld (1995), which was bleeding money on its way to becoming the most expensive film ever made at the time. But Roven wanted Gilliam anyway, and pulled strings to get him. Gilliam is frequently quoted as saying, with a laugh, “It just goes to show you, there is no bridge you can burn in Hollywood.”
It’s hard to imagine what 12 Monkeys would look like if it weren’t a Terry Gilliam film, and I think a large part of that is due to the film’s truly incredible sense of place. It’s a sci fi film where essentially all of its special effects are in the setting—which is exactly where they should be, when the goal is to create the same grim world in two disorienting timelines. Gilliam, cinematographer Roger Pratt, production designer Jeffrey Beecroft, and location manager Scott Elias created the settings of both the post-apocalyptic future and the pre-apocalyptic present by using what was already available in early ’90s Baltimore and Philadelphia. Gilliam always intended to shoot the film on location, rather than in constructed studio sets, which seems reasonable enough until you realize what sort of locations they were using, and how much shooting on location meant risking decades-old buildings falling in on their heads.
The underground prison in which James Cole (Bruce Willis) is incarcerated was built on site, using forced perspective cages, in Philadelphia’s unused Richmond Generating Station, a glorious neoclassical behemoth of a ruin. When Cole makes his first foray to the surface, those scenes are filmed in the Delaware Generating Station, another gorgeous ruin in Philly that required months of repairs and asbestos abatement to make it safe for filming. While filming, the production crew actually opened the station’s floodgates to have Cole tramp through several inches of water—and this was filmed in the middle of winter. The room where the scientists interrogate Cole before and after his trips through time is in yet another old power plant, the Westport Generating Station in Baltimore, specifically in a basement turbine room.
I absolutely love this extensive use of abandoned industrial locations. Anthony Simonaitis, the on-set special effects supervisor, has said that a great deal of what they did in 12 Monkeys would more safely and more comfortably be done with green screen and CGI now. But they didn’t have that option in the early ’90s, and Gilliam was in love with old power stations, so they built a future human society into reminders of the past.
The worldbuilding and scene-setting decisions were very story-driven: Where would people end up if they had to go underground quickly? What would they bring with them? What would they leave behind? But the film isn’t about the immediate aftermath of the outbreak and the collapse of society; it’s an apocalypse story in which the actual apocalypse exists entirely in the lacuna between Cole’s present and the pre-pandemic past. As a result, the details of why humans moved underground are not really important. I would even go so far as to say that aspects of the film are poking fun at the idea that any society, pre- or post-apocalypse, can ever truly make sense—this is a Terry Gilliam film, after all.
A large part of this, of course, is that what we see of both of those time periods is from the perspective of a main character who is in turns a prisoner, a mental patient, and a fugitive. The panel of scientists who send Cole traveling through time is a mirror image of the panel of psychiatrists in the hospital. Cole always exists somewhere in the gritty, hidden, unwanted margins of society, occupying a series of positions that exemplify profound systemic failures. We don’t see any of the society of his timeline outside of the prison; we only know there is a society outside the prison because of the way the prisoners are treated as deviant with respect to it. We don’t need to see it. What would we see? An American society that is capable of great feats of engineering and science but relies on forced prison labor? We already live in that society.
The limited information we have about the post-apocalyptic world is a big part of why I find the film’s characterization of the pre-apocalyptic world so fascinating, even more so than the immersive scene-setting of the future timeline. Sure, there are the obvious and expected scenes where decay has been applied to show the abandonment of the surface and the passage of time, a tried-and-true tactic for creating emotionally alluring imagery in post-apocalyptic stories. In 12 Monkeys we begin with Cole seeing a lion prowling Philadelphia’s iconic City Hall in the snow-swept future and later seeing that same building as the intact center of government it is today. It’s visual shorthand for the bewildering changes, but it’s also a beloved genre-wide trope because it works every time. (Every time! Just ask my former housemate and your current Reactor anime columnist Leah Thomas how excited I was when she was playing Horizon Zero Dawn and I recognized the overgrown, post-apocalyptic version of my hometown of Colorado Springs in the game.)
A cool aside about the lion on City Hall: When the Peoples were brainstorming their screenplay, one of the very first images they seized upon was a world in which animals ruled the surface while humans cowered underground. I love that detail because I love knowing what kernels of ideas lie at the center of stories, and I love know what vivid images writers carry with them as they develop a story. And I think this is a really neat example of a core central image being used to bookend a film: the wild animals Cole sees in the beginning in contrast with the freed zoo animals he sees at the end.
Beyond those obvious visual cues between the pre- and post-apocalyptic worlds, there are quite a lot of scenes and settings in 12 Monkeys that exist in that the same liminal zone that Cole occupies, and that Dr. Kathryn Railly (Madeline Stowe) comes to occupy as the story goes along and she begins to doubt her own sanity, loses her credibility, and runs afoul of the law herself.
(I know I’m not the only one who cried, “Detective Stabler, what are you doing here?” when she’s being questioned by the cop played by Christopher Meloni. Then I looked it up and realized L&O: SVU didn’t premiere until 1999. Then I remembered that before he was on SVU, Richard Belzer’s Detective Munch first came from the great, unmatched Homicide: Life on the Street, which takes place in Baltimore and was airing in 1993, and that character also showed up in The X-Files, so I think Detective Munch would have at least considered that the time travel plague story was part of a larger conspiracy. That’s all I’m saying. He would have considered it.)
The most vivid physical manifestation of the characters’ placement at the edges of society is the mental hospital where Cole is held at the beginning, where he meets Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt). Here the filmmakers left the industrial settings behind, but not the scale and sense of bleak, ruined grandeur. Those scenes were filmed at Philadelphia’s notorious Eastern State Penitentiary, a place that is very familiar to both paranormal and history buffs. The prison was built in the 1820s with a specific and horrific mission: to push inmates toward penitence by subjecting them to forced labor and extreme solitary confinement, with long blocks of cells radiating from a central point meant to convey the all-seeing surveillance of a panopticon. In the early ’90s, when the 12 Monkeys crew scouted the location, the prison hadn’t been used in about twenty years and was in the process of being stabilized and preserved as a historical and tourist site, which is what it is now. They have cocktail lounges and haunted houses at Halloween.
The point is, the reason the film’s psychiatric hospital looks like a crumbling ruin and a prison is because that’s exactly what it is. But unlike the scenes in the underground of the future world, which are kept dark and shadowy, the scenes in the psychiatric hospital are often very brightly lit, so that all of the cracks in the walls and crumbling plaster and rust are impossible to ignore. The decay that is on display within the hospital walls extends beyond them; the film crew specifically sought out majestic, abandoned buildings to represent their vision of American cities. Because, after all, the terrible catch at the center of the story is that the inhumane cruelty of the dystopian future has been there all along.
12 Monkeys has gotten a lot of renewed attention thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, but it’s also interesting because of just how vividly it incapsulates the social and political fears of early ’90s America. Even though they are quite different, the other film from that era that I keep thinking about with a similar grim atmosphere is Alex Proyas’ The Crow (1994) (which is perfect in every way and the only The Crow that exists; please stop trying to gaslight me into believing otherwise). Both use speculative elements to carve out a contemporary dystopia from the most extreme American fears about American urban life. The constant theme of not being able to tell if you’re mad or the world is mad, the drug-obsessed carceral state, the urban decay and failing cities. The awareness that any guy on the street might be dreaming up acts of horrific violence. The justifiable mistrust of government and authority. The dehumanization of people at the fringes of society.
Sci fi often explores the idea that dystopian or apocalyptic stories are those in which the circumstances in which the poor and marginalized already exist are applied to everyone. The plague in 12 Monkeys does exactly that. It takes the fears the ’90s American public had about viruses and expanded them to everyone, as a means for ending the world that couldn’t be blamed on belonging to the wrong group or engaging in the wrong behavior (as was the popular rhetoric around AIDS), nor on insidious foreign threats brought in from dangerous faraway places (as was the public response to Ebola). The 12 Monkeys plague is homegrown—more than that, it’s homemade—and it comes for everyone.
One more thing on that topic. I haven’t said anything yet about where 12 Monkeys stands in comparison to La Jetée, because they are very different movies that utilize the same closed-loop time travel tragedy to tell different stories. But I do want to bring up the point of contrast that are the films’ respective ways of bringing about the end of the world.
The events that lead to La Jetée’s nuclear apocalypse happen at such a high level the governments involved don’t even matter. The idea of preventing it isn’t part of the story. There is no mystery to be solved by the time travel, no nations or companies or persons to be namechecked with the blame, no series of actions the time traveler could take to change the course of history. This is very much representative of attitudes in the Cold War era, during which a lot of fiction, and especially sci fi, assume that large forces on a global scale are pushing toward World War III.
But things changed by the early ’90s. The Cold War was over. Boris Yeltsin was in the news promising not to point Russian nukes at the U.S. anymore. Even in Terminator, when the world still ends with a nuclear apocalypse, the decision-making that leads to that point has been outsourced to machines. 12 Monkeys takes it even further and places that decision entirely in the hands of one man. David Morse’s Dr. Peters is all too familiar today, as the kind of intense, dangerous, accelerationist conspiracy theorist you can still find all over message boards, or occasionally elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. And at the time the film was made, the idea of a lone terrorist at work was foremost in American minds: the Unabomber was still unidentified and at large.
That shift from La Jetée’s World War III to 12 Monkey’s lone terrorist is fascinating to me, and the contrast is part of why I love both movies, both separately and in conversation with each other. The fear and paranoia of the Cold War shifted into a pronounced kind of isolation and nihilism, all of it wrapped around the question of what it means to be sane in a world that’s gone mad.
12 Monkeys is a time capsule of the early ’90s, firmly grounded in when and where it was made, with such a vivid setting that I notice new things every time I watch it. But that doesn’t make it feel dated and out-of-touch. Instead, it feels like it has grown more relevant and effective over time—and not because we’re still constantly worried about plagues, but because of the way it understands that post-apocalyptic stories are based in both the fear and the fantasy that even if the world ends, it might just keep going on as it always has.
What do you think about 12 Monkeys? Have your thoughts about it changed since it first came out? I have never seen the television show based on the movie—how does it compare?
Put Your Thinking Spacesuits On
It’s back-to-school season, so let’s fire up our brains for some sci fi films that tackle big ideas: Where do we come from? Where are we going? What is our place in the universe? What does it mean to be human? And why is there a fetus floating in space?
September 4 — 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), directed by Stanley Kubrick
Fifty-six years later and everybody is still crediting/blaming this movie whenever there is another big, thinky sci film released into the wild.
Watch: Max, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft
View the trailer.
September 11 — Ghost in the Shell (1995), directed by Mamoru Oshii
Sometimes when I see news articles about computer scientists patiently trying to explain, for the gazillionth time, that shitty chatbots are not sentient intelligences, I think about how, about fifteen years ago, I heard a prominent SFF author say that cyberpunk would never be relevant again.
Watch: Amazon, Hoopla, Tubi, Apple, Microsoft.
View the trailer.
September 18 — Contact (1995), directed by Robert Zemeckis
I haven’t seen this since college. I remember that Jodie Foster makes first contact with aliens and the world reacts with all the measured calm one expects from the human species.
Watch: Amazon, Apple, Microsoft.
View the trailer.
September 25 – Stalker (1979), directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
I’ve never seen this movie before, although I have read Roadside Picnic. All I know is that people have really strong opinions about it on the internet.
Watch: Max, Criterion, Amazon, Apple.
View the trailer.
