And noticed that following the scene in the abadoned building where two thugs attack bruce willis and the lady, they rush out into the street passing by a street bum preacher claiming he knows the apocolyptic end is near – repent! when the street preacher sees bruce willis he yells at bruce, “you there, youre one of US!” indicating that he may be from the future and recognizes bruce willis?
Oh no, it’s back again! Kill it! Kill the zombie with fire!
Seriously people, why do you keep bumping this thread I started almost 1/3rd of my life ago?
You can’t change what happened but you can change the way it happens. Originally Jeffery/brad Pitt is the virus carrier in the dream. At the end Katherine/Madeline Stowe calls jefferey’s father and tells him of the plan so he tells the lab guy to beef up security. When brad Pitt kidnaps him afterwards he tells brad Pitt that he doesn’t have the security codes for the virus. Maybe… He gave the security codes to the lab guy - how else would he get it? Maybe not… Anyways how many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie roll pop???
I like that we keep traveling back in time to this movie…
Anyway, I had a completely different impression of what happened on the plane: I always assumed that the woman who was “in insurance” was not a traveler from the future, but a completely unaware resident of the past. I thought the great irony was supposed to be that…
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the future leaders were desperately trying to find out who released the plague, and here she actually sat next to the dude who did it, and had no idea
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she’s just some dumb insurance agent who, after the apocalypse, manages to worm her way into the upper echelons of power
I always thought that the fact that she still looked just as old as her future-self was simply bad makeup work on Gilliam’s team’s part.
Or it could be evidence that Cole was genuinely delusional. He didn’t come from the future - he was just a crazy guy who thought he was a time traveler.
We saw earlier in the movie he imagined Goines as the man in the airport - this is evidence that his memories were, at some level, imaginary. He was just seeing things and incorporating them into his delusion that he was a time traveler from the future. He saw a random women in the airport (who identified herself as an insurance agent) and he imagined her as a scientist from the future
There was foreshadowing of this. Cole met the man in the mental hospital who explained how he was “mentally divergent” and was imagining he lived in an alternate reality - he was describing the same condition Cole had. And when the street preacher told him “You’re one of us” he wasn’t saying they were time travelers - he was saying Cole was another crazy street dweller.
The problem with that is the quantity of scenes that don’t have Cole in them, i.e. the staff of the hospital examining the isolation room where Cole vanished, including the doctor played by Frank Gorshin speculating that Cole had climbed up to a ceiling vent and was now crawling through the ventilation system. You’d have to go pretty meta to say that scene was in Cole’s head, assuming (I guess) that he was still in the hospital and just had an elaborate delusion that he’d escaped and the staff were discussing it.
That wasn’t in the future. That might have been something that really happened. Cole may have escaped from the mental hospital rather than traveling back to the future.
If I had some fancy software, I’d be tempted to make an edit of the movie with all the future scenes cut out and see how it held together. You wouldn’t see Cole in the future anymore on the screen; you’d only hear him talking about his times in the future to other people.
I’ll add that I’m not insisting on this interpretation. I’m just saying it’s a possible interpretation that works as well as any other (and that Gilliam has made several other movies about characters living in a fantasy world).
If Cole is delusional, he’s also precognitive. He knows things before they happen. Like the kid in danger that turned out to be a hoax. Or the fact that early in the movie he sees zoo animal loose in the city, but they don’t get released until the end of the movie. No, it’s simpler to see him as a real time traveller.
So a fully sedated, fully restrained patient somehow did slip out that vent, replaced the grill behind him and went wriggling his way through the ventilation system ?
He managed to avoid getting re-arrested for six years, too, since he fell off the radar in 1990 and re-emerged in 1996, which is pretty impressive for someone that deeply delusional, though I suppose that can be explained (I vaguely recall something about Cole not letting himself be fingerprinted in 1990, though I may be misremembering, and if this was the case, he could conceivably have been arrested in another city and held as an unidentified John Doe).
Anyway, the World War I photo (and the “antique” bullet in Cole’s leg) is pretty indicative. While it’s possible to interpret major events in the move as being the main character’s delusion, I’m not sure how it makes the movie better.
The street preacher also appears earlier in the film in Dr. Railys lecture on doomsdays prophets. She shows a medieval woodcut of a man predicting a plague in the 1990s who is almost identical to the preacher. I figure he’s another agent who accidently got sent back to the middle ages before being more accurately placed in the relevant era. Goes to show that maybe the scientists had more irons in the fire than Cole and “Bob.”
The kid in the barn didn’t prove Cole was precognitive. Go to the Celebrity Deathpool thread. You’ll see dozens of people who “knew” somebody was going to die this year. And you’ll see hundreds of people who didn’t know. One correct guess about a future event doesn’t prove precognition.
Now if Cole had correctly predicted the whole “Army of the Twelve Monkeys” scenario, I’d concede that meant something. But the movie suggested that it was Cole talking about the terrorist plot that gave the idea to the people who carried it out.
Love it! I’d overlooked that before.
The photo is indicative if you’re already half-convinced that Cole was a time traveler who went back to World War I.
Here’s the actual photo. Would you have positively identified that shadowy figure as Bruce Willis if you didn’t expect it to be Bruce Willis?
So did Cole see that photo at some point, come to believe he was in it, and create an elaborate delusion in which the man on the stretcher the bald man is reaching for is a fellow time-traveler?
And somewhere along the way, someone (possibly Cole himself) shot a vintage WW1 bullet into Cole’s leg?
Besides, that’s not the actual photo - it’s a photo of the photo, and of lesser quality than the glossy image Kathryn Railly finds in one of her history books.
Further still, doesn’t Cole at one point recite the order of cities in which the outbreak occurs, in the exact order of cities Dr. Peters plans to visit, as commented on by the ticket agent?
Something that occurs to me is that if the scientists in the future ever find a cure or vaccine, why don’t they bring it back to the past with them? Instead, they let 6 billion people die.
Or maybe they DID bring it back and somewhere on 1997 earth is an island of immune people just waiting for the other 6 billion to die before restarting civilization as they desire…
Because the plague made them top of the food chain. They like that they’re in charge now (the future); they just want a cure so that they can reclaim the surface and live a little better. If the plague doesn’t kill everybody, they’re just some shlubs–who aren’t ruling humanity.
There’s also the apparent issue that, per the movie’s time travel mechanism, changing the past is not possible. You can travel to the past to get information, but you can’t alter history. Your attempts at altering history are already part of the timeline that you’re living.
Or, possibly, the future Powers That Be have convinced themselves of the latter in order to rationalize the former.
I should watch the movie again if I’m going to get into an in-depth discussion of it.
Maybe Cole had a delusion he traveled to World War I and told Kathryn this. Believing this was true, he would have sounded convincing. Later she saw a picture of a man in a World War I era photograph who looked like Cole. Does that prove the man actually was Cole? Millions of people served in the trenches - what are the odds that none of them looked like Cole?
That’s a detail I don’t remember. When Cole was talking about the virus attack, did he recite the names of the cities?
There is another significant piece of counter-evidence nobody’s mentioned: Kathryn’s phone message. If I recall correctly, Cole never told Kathryn what the message was. But after she had already made it, he knew what she had said before she told him. If I’ve recalled the sequence of events correctly, that would be a significant prediction: it was a specific event; it was confirmed by somebody other than Cole; it wasn’t something Cole had suggested; and it was something that Cole didn’t have prior knowledge of in the present before he made his prediction.
The Futurama Approach to time travel:
Professor Farnsworth: “And remember, don’t do anything that affects anything, unless it turns out you were supposed to, in which case, for the love of God, don’t not do it!”
Well, somebody did - it might have been one of the scientists, but if all those scenes are just delusions of Cole, it’s like saying somebody had a dream that later came true in a very specific fashion.
And you’re right - Cole reciting the message Kathryn left with the “carpet cleaning company” isn’t to be casually dismissed.
Nor, I should add, is the World War I bullet in Cole’s leg.