Twelve Monkeys is an Academy Award-nominated 1995 science fiction film directed by Terry Gilliam and written by David and Janet Peoples. The film deals with time travel, madness and memory and is inspired by the French short film La Jetée. It stars Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, and Brad Pitt who won a Golden Globe for best supporting actor; Pitt was also nominated for an Academy Award in the same category.[1] Awards for Twelve Monkeys

Plot

James Cole (Willis) is a convicted criminal living in a grim post-apocalyptic future. The Earth's surface has been contaminated by a virus so deadly that it killed five billion people in 1996 and 1997, forcing the surviving population to live underground. In the beginning of the movie, Cole is forced to "volunteer" on a mission to the surface in a barren Philadelphia. He collects bugs and is returned to the underground where another mission is proposed. To earn a pardon, Cole allows scientists to send him on dangerous missions to the past to collect information on the virus. If possible, he is to obtain a pure sample of the original virus so a cure can be made, enabling the human race to return to the surface. Throughout the film, Cole is troubled with recurring dreams involving a chase and a shooting in an airport.

The scientists' time machine is imprecise. On Cole's first trip, he arrives in Baltimore in 1990, not 1996 as planned. He is arrested and hospitalized in a mental institution on the diagnosis of Dr. Kathryn Railly (Stowe). There he encounters Jeffrey Goines (Pitt), a fellow mental patient with animal rights and anti-consumerist leanings. Cole tries unsuccessfully to leave a voice mail on a number monitored by the scientists in the future. After a failed escape attempt, Cole is placed in restraints and locked in a cell, but is then returned to the future, a disappearance which baffles his doctors.