Great movie.
I think Gilliam was being purposefully ambiguous; there was just enough evidence to support any one of several theories as to what was really going on. There is no single, indisputably right answer. My own take is that the plague will still spread, since the security guard released it in the airport, but now the woman on the plane who’s “in insurance” will be able to take some of the pure strain back to the future (ahem), and thus ensure that humanity will endure.
I introduced my dad to this movie just recently. Great film that stands up to repeat viewings well.
For the first time, I noticed the blonde guard from the future staring at Cole on the escalator at the airport…
:eek: Wow that blew my mind! I never noticed that, and will be sure to look for it next time I see it.
Plus, isn’t that pretty much what our hero flatly says, word-for-word? (Sure, he slips in a sexist assumption, but leave that aside for the moment.)
“This already happened. I can’t save you; nobody can. I am simply trying to gather information to help the people in the present trace the path of the virus … That’s my mission. I just have to locate them, because they have the virus in its pure form, before it mutates. When I locate them, they’ll send a scientist back here; that scientist will study the virus, and then, when he goes back to the present, he and the rest of the scientists will make a cure.”
Thanks. It’s been quite awhile since I’ve seen it.
But it’s not altered - it’s the only way it ever happened. The scientists send Cole and the others back because they always did. Cole was always in the WWI photo, but it was only on his entering the 1990s that the significance was determined.
But why would they want to stop it? They’ve got their nice little technocracy which they have no desire to get rid of. With a cure, they can reestablish a surface society with the scientists in their rightful place.
Which is why they want the cure. So they can do both.
(Yes, I know this is a zombie thread. Get over yourself.)
I hadn’t thought about this before, but nobody from the future apparently observed the release at the security checkpoint, so does the scientist on the plane even realize she is being exposed to the virus? Is she going to steal a vial and then return to the future not knowing the virus was already released and she is infected? Is she going to unwittingly wipe out the future survivors by spreading the infection to them when she returns?
Eh that seems more like a generality rather than sexism.
There were no more monkeys jumping on the bed?
I have no idea what movie or show this thread is even talking about, probably because I was 11 at the time it was made
Two 12 Monkeys zombies in a week. Someone is trying to tell us something!
My take has always been what Mr. President said in #46, yes the scientists are truly interested in finding a cure for the plague that is keeping their little pocket of humanity stuck underground, but they surely don’t seem to be looking for the cure out of any altruism.
Ooooh! I hadn’t thought of that. Good one. Now I want to watch it again.
It’s a good movie you should check it out sometime.
Considering the decon and quarantine procedures shown in the early part of the film, She’ll die, but probably not infect anyone else. The way she looks at her hand after shaking hands with David Morse makes me think that she knows that she’s just committed suicide.
I had settled on a sort of timeline that had Cole going back in time, failing, the scientists realising this and then sending someone back again to simply collect a sample of the virus instead of stopping it. IIRC, the bullet Cole took in WWI travelled with him to later in the 20th century, so I suppose samples might be taken with the travellers (inhaled and in the scientist’s blood stream it seems).
Poor Cole knew all this would happen all along though, but only he knew what would happen in advance. Is that some sort of specific story telling technique?
I have wondered the same thing, it seems common in time traveling stories or where characters are seperated otherwise. The drama stems from imperfect knowledge by some characters.
I know this may seem a little out of left field but I always had a different take on the end. That the scientist was really going to sell insurance and make a killing (sorry for that pun) with so many dead and no one to collect they could make out- that was the scientists motives all along. Its a pretty comedically dark interpretation but this is Terry gilliam - all the scientists in the movie are made out to be self serving fools including the psychoanalysts from the first scene on . Any takers?
But all that money would be worthless after the plague swept over the planet, wouldn’t it?
I dunno - I could buy that some significant percentage of the human population was immune to the virus in its initial form (if not, extinction would have followed), but it rapidly mutated into something universally lethal. For some technobabbly reason, the future scientists needed a sample of the original, and that’s what the “insurance” woman was sent to collect, once Cole had narrowed down the target.
David Morse is really a great actor.
He is indeed. I noticed that back in his St. Elsewhere days. He also played George Washington quite well in the HBO John Adams series.
Just watched it again…always brings up new ideas/questions.
Dr. Pinky mentioned “HOWEVER, followng (Everest?) multi-universe interpretation of quantum bifurcation, it may be possible to travel to a near-by parallel universe at a ‘prior’ moment, and alter its course with impunity. These apparent paradoxes disolve when you realize that they are not saving their own world, but only a neighboring world.”
In the movie, the last time Cole is in the scientists’ chamber before being sent back the last time, he says "Well, sir, I don’t think the human mind was built to exist in two different…whatever you call it…“dimensions.”
Any credibility to the thought that they are different dimensions, and whatever happens to the dimension that Cole is sent to doesn’t have any effect on the dimension they’re from? That they can’t travel back in time, but to different dimensions at different moments…so in their dimension, nothing can be changed, but they can access the information from other dimensions to help in their future.