The premise of the story is that they wanted a pure sample of the original virus which somehow will help them immunize against mutated forms and let them return to the planet’s surface in 2027. How exactly this was going to work is left unclear, but I’ll buy it. They had already determined that they couldn’t change the past (or at least not in any significant way) so they weren’t even trying. It’s not far removed from virtually all other time-travel fiction in which the characters arrive during or shortly before a major historical (to them) event and feel they can’t (or shouldn’t try to; or if they try to, the effort fails or makes things worse) change it. I have to admit, I find it less satisfying when the time travellers themselves become an integral part of the historical event, but I can tolerate in Twelve Monkeys because James Cole didn’t realize he was doing so. By comparison, the rah-rah cheerleading of Zephram Cochrane in Star Trek: First Contact is repellent.
Okay, I see that now. My mistake. If we had an edit feature, I could go back and change my earlier response, but evidently the administrators here have the same attitude toward changing the past as the future scientists.
Remember the phonebox ringing at the very end?
Some people think that Mac, who’d fallen in love with the town (you called him Boone, but his name was Mac) was calling, perhaps returning to Scotland.
But nobody really knows who the caller is.
But the flashback scenes weren’t fixed. In the early scenes, the face of the person in Cole’s flashbacks who gets shot in the airport isn’t seen. But after Cole meets Goines, we see a flashback in which Cole now “remembers” Goines was the person who gets shot. Obviously even if Coles was a time traveler, he couldn’t have actually remembered that - Goines, as it turned out, was not the person who got shot. This showed that Coles’ memories were not accurate and they were being influenced by things he was experiencing around him. And once you recognize that some of his memories were false, it opens up the possibility that all of his memories might be false.
We once had a lively debate on the SDMB about this very subject, with each side siting evidence for the reality or non-reality of Arnie’s adventure. I was in the “real” camp, but of course you can’t prove it either way.
Doesn’t matter. David Morse’s character had already released the virus – he opened the vial for the security guard earlier. Perhaps she did, and Morse (now a carrier of the virus) simply visited his destinations to spread it.
That ending may have been aimed at the audience. There would have been plenty of audience members who were as attracted by Cagney’s character as the kids in the movie were. If Rocky had agreed on camera to fake his cowardice, he might have convinced the kids in the movie but the kids in the viewing audience would have known he was faking it and that he had really been brave to the end. By making it clear he wouldn’t agree to fake being a coward and then showing him really being a coward, the audience as well as the movie characters saw him having a bad end.
