Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys is one of the strangest time travel movies of all…well, time. After watching it, I found myself dumbfounded—sitting on my couch with my mouth half open, I stared at the screen as the credits rolled by, asking myself, What just happened?

The story follows a man named James Cole (played by Bruce Willis), who is a prisoner in the year of 2035. He and all of what’s left of humanity lives underground, hiding from a deadly virus that was released by a radical terrorist group known as The Army of the Twelve Monkeys that killed 5 billion people back in 1996. In the present (2035), the scientists who are trying to find a cure for the virus figure out time travel. They send Cole (who is a prisoner and therefore expendable) back to 1996 to track the virus so the scientists could create a cure. However, they make a mistake and accidentally send him back to 1990, six years before anything was supposed happen.

Immediately after waking up in 1990, he attacks some cops, nearly killing two of them, Cole ends up getting arrested. He warns everyone of their impending doom and is consequently labeled a paranoid schizophrenic and taken to a mental ward.

Arriving at the ward, Cole is introduced to a strange patient named Jeffrey Goines (played by Brad Pitt), and he tells him about the virus. Jeffrey seems to be the only one that listens, besides Dr. Kathryn Railly (played by Madeleine Stowe) who interprets everything Cole says as the ramblings of a schizophrenic with a messiah complex. The rest of the film follows Cole and the aforementioned characters as the people from the future try to track the path of the virus, and Cole avoids police and the hospital.

The plot sounds insane, the characters are insane, and the fact that they put a wig on Bruce Willis is by far the most insane thing about this movie. It doesn’t have the slapstick-type characters from Back to the Future; when the movie was funny, it was funny. When it was sad, it was sad.

This wasn’t a quick buck type of film. It was developed and different; that’s what makes a good movie. the atmosphere feels like it’s dragging you in. You hold your breath during intense scenes; you try to piece it all together.

To add to the mood, the cinematography is something to marvel at, with deep ambience and color. The set design is so realistic—it looked like New York was an actual wasteland. I could see the ghosts of former buildings, taken over by nature, animals running free in the city, cars abandoned and stripped of parts—barely recognizable. the entire “future” had this enhanced eerie sci-fi vibe to it. It was obvious it was the future, and it even seemed plausible (something many sci-fi films don’t achieve).

The characters felt a bit extreme sometimes, but otherwise the acting was phenomenal.You pity and sympathize with Bruce Willis’ character, you want to be on his side as the movie continues, but there are times when you question his sanity. Brad Pitt played his character brilliantly. His actions seemed radical and unpredictable and I loved it. He really broke the constrictive box of sanity with his character, playing someone who looked like he’d jump five feet in the air at the drop of a pin.

After seeing the Die Hard and Red series (both with Bruce Willis as the lead), it was really refreshing to sit down and watch this film again. The movies are just so different from each other. All the violence was fun, with unnecessary explosions and lots of blood. The plots were interesting for their respective genres as well, but nothing beats Bruce Willis in a good psychological thriller like Twelve Monkeys.

Having seen it close to six times, I can confidently say that I still don’t completely understand the film. And that’s just fine with me. It’s just one of those films you can just watch over and over again, each time learning something new that makes you question your original theory. To put it more appropriately in James Cole’s words, “It's just like what's happening with us, like the past. The movie never changes. It can't change; but every time you see it, it seems different because you're different. You see different things.”