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Twelve Monkeys (1995) (aka
12 Monkeys)
In director Terry Gilliam's sci-fi fantasy about time
travel and a devastating plague (a remake of Chris Marker's short
film La Jetée/The Pier (1962, Fr.)):
- the key scene in the film - the recurring obsessive
nightmarish dream that haunted delusional, time-traveling convict
and asylum inmate James 'Jim' Cole (Bruce Willis), of himself as
a young boy (Joseph Melito) seeing a man in an airport gunned down
by police, and then raising his bloody hand up to the face of a
grieving blonde woman - a childhood memory whose meaning was not
understood even though it replayed itself endlessly
- the dystopic 1996-1997 snow-covered, plague-ridden
Philadelphia, overrun with wild animals (bears, lions, etc.)
- the character of insane animal
activist Jeffrey Goines (Oscar-nominated Brad Pitt) whose radical
group "The Army of the 12 Monkeys" was not the cause of
the worldwide plague that killed five billion people and made Earth
unlivable
- the scene in which psychiatrist Dr. Kathryn Railly
(Madeleine Stowe) realized Cole was telling the truth, when she saw
him in an old World War I photograph (after removing an antique bullet
from a leg wound) from her book research - and then fell in love
with him
- the transcendent scene when "the 12 Monkeys" released
all the animals out of Philadelphia's Garden Zoological Society
- the ending in which it was revealed that young Cole's
dream-memory was actually him witnessing his own death (with the
blonde woman being Kathryn)
- the film's brilliant use of performer Louis Armstrong's
singing "What A Wonderful World" during the end credits
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