12 Monkeys 15

Like his fabled predecessor fleeing Bagdad, James Coles (Bruce Willis) travels back in time in an attempt to thwart fate, only to find that he and humanity must keep their own appointment in Samarra. As we will discuss, Twelve Monkeys marks a memorable contribution to longstanding debates in fiction and philosophy regarding fate, free will and the ontological status of the future. The film also questions the ‘shape’ of time itself, subverting traditional Western ideas of rectilinearity and teleology (in which ‘the End’ is the end) with the nightmarish possibility that the Apocalypse merely marks the beginning of a sisyphean cycle of eternal recurrence.