When that guy from the future gives Cole the gun in the airport he also mentions that they had just finished piecing together the message.
I guess you can argue that they could have waited until the message was deciphered before they sent Cole back but then he wouldn’t have been there to leave the message in the first place…or something like that. Time travel and paradoxes give me a headache.
Chuck,
My take on it is that they knew that Dr Goines created the virus but it’s kept under tight security and Cole would probably have very little chance of getting anywhere near it.
I can see it now:
“Excuse me, I’m from the future. Got any deadly viruses around here? Hey I just need a sample, OK? Why are you looking at me like that?”
Since the doctor’s unstable son is the leader of the 12 Monkeys, a group the future thinks is responsible for releasing the virus, I guess they think it’s a good place to start looking for a sample.
What I always wondered was how do they plan to get a sample back to the future?
My guess:
When airport security examines the vials the virus gets released by David Morse. He actually opens the vial and sniffs it while looking around the air as if to say “there it’s done, no turning back now”. So if that’s the case then wouldn’t the future scientist be infected with the pure sample just by sitting next to David Morse on the plane? When she goes back to the future she’ll have her sample.
Mission accomplished?
I just watched this movie last week, but I guess I missed something. Who is it that the “mad scientist” (the guy who releases the virus, employed by Dr. Leland Goines) sits next to on the airplane? Is it the woman in the group of scientist that dispatch Willis’s character? (Carol Florence, who is credited as Astrophysicist)?
I loved the film, but I haven’t read any commentary or anything about it.
I was always under the impression that the virus could not be prevented because it had already been released to the security guard in the airport (as Phobos mentioned).
The fact that Jose provides Willis’ character with a gun and tells him to shoot the man responsible tells me that even if the original aim of the scientists was to get a pure sample of the virus, they may have decided to at least try to alter the past and prevent the epidemic (in their place, who wouldn’t at least try?).
Then when the scientist shows up on the plane and says that she’s “insurance,” it seems to me that is too much to ask of coincidence. She probably succeeds in getting a pure sample of the virus to bring back to the future.
Not exactly a happy ending, with billions still about to die, but not the worst possible ending either.
Then again, it is left pretty ambiguous on purpose, I’m sure.
I’ve seen all of Gilliam’s films. He’s one of my favorite filmmakers. And I absolutely agree that he’d be the last person on Earth to make a film with the message “Don’t worry. Trust authority figures. Follow orders blindly and everything will be all right in the end.” On the other hand 12 Monkeys was written by David Peoples who tacked a happy ending onto the end of Blade Runner.
In my opinion, the bleakest of all endings would be the Coincidence one. Assume that the woman on the plane is an insurance agent when the plague strikes. She’s not a great scientist (maybe she was a C+ astrophysics major) but with 99% of humanity dead, she’s able to rise to the top of what’s left. She may not be in charge but she’s obviously a lot more powerful than she was before. And we can assume all her colleagues came from similar backgrounds.
The result of this is that these scientists have no chance of curing the plague. They’re simply going through the motions of working on a cure to justify the control they have over the lives of others. Cole’s efforts were doomed from before they even began. Even if he succeeded against all odds in bringing back a virus sample it would accomplish nothing.
This I feel is a typical Gilliam message. He’s always shown that the worst from of evil is incompetent evil, which causes suffering for no reason, not even self serving ones.
I always thought that the woman really was “in insurance” and was not any sort of scientist at all. She was sitting there simply by coincidence. The point of the scene was to demonstrate that the future human population was so decimated by the virus that people who had no idea what they were doing were able to (or had to) take over. I thought that, all through the film, the “scientists” did not quite seem to know what they were doing.
Also, I thought that she looked younger enough in the 'plane to be there without having travelled back in time.
True enough, if you disregard their successful time machine, tracking devices, etc.
One argument against this view is that the scientist/insurance woman shakes hands with the “mad scientist” - looked very deliberate, as if attempting to get a virus sample off his hands.
She is in the same position as Cole was: she is uncovering the significance of events in the past, not changing them. She cannot be getting a sample of the virus, since in the present she would already know where it was. Through Cole’s efforts she is discovering that she sat next to the virus-releaser. The way the time travel works in the film is that the past and the present are bound together - the deeds of the time travellers are set in stone in the past. What the time-travellers can achieve is to turn information - which in the cases of both Cole and the scientist is already known - into useful knowledge.
Because in their timeline, Bruce Willis hadn’t yet gone back in time to record all the messages. They send him, he sends a message, they retrieve him in order to give him a new mission based on the info he collected.
Apparently, they couldn’t time travel to the future to get all this info at once (now, that would be a paradox).
First - it’s clear that the scientists in the future BELIEVED that the past could not be changed, but that Cole had changed that belief. This was difficult to test because if the past were changed the timeline had changed and they wouldn’t know it.
BUT - they got a message from someone in the past OTHER THAN Cole. Clearly, prior to Cole going into the past this could have not happened. Therefore, Cole clearly changed the past.
They may have also found that a bullet from circa 1920 ended up in 1996. This was also a change in the past.
So they now know the past CAN be changed - at least by Cole. OTHERWISE it would make no sense to ask Jose to put a gun in Cole’s hand. They could simply ask them to identify the assistant, and send someone back to an earlier time to get the virus.
Thus, I hold the belief that the movie actually has - and reflects - multiple evolving timelines. Some of the information we see changes because the timelines are changing for the characters.
This doesn’t answer the question about whether in the final scene the scientist from the future was there to complete Cole’s original or changed mission. Personally, I think she was there to stop him for two reasons.
If their goal was to be certain that the virus was spread, then wouldn’t there have been plenty of opportunities to simply scuttle the time machine?
There is a glass of champagne poured when the assistant arrives at his seat. This should be her glass. Yet, she takes the NEW glass offered by the flight attendant. This makes me believe that the current glass has been drugged, perhaps poisoned.
Looks like he may have been successful in stopping the virus but no one expected a completely different disaster. The zombie apocalypse seems to have killed everyone off anyway so all their effort to stop the virus was in vain.
