So, let me also be an audience who tries to make the story round.
1.
This is a story about time travel, not a story about mentally divergent.
Terry Gilliam set up a confusing target here: the black man with schizophrenia in suit and shoes that appeared in about 20 minutes. Although his left and right in the film are mainly to confuse James Cole's sense of reality, the black man obviously made the audience a lot of comments.
(Set up the so-called multi-dimensional perception of the movie)
However, we have a realistic coordinate system: psychologists, police officers, the person who confirmed that James escaped from the mental hospital...and the picture of World War II.
107 minutes and a half when James watched a movie, James said that the image will not change, which can be seen as a proof.
Since James appeared in the World War II photo in this "normal mental coordinate system", the police obtained evidence that the bullet was sent out in 1920, and both the psychologist and the guards of the mental hospital have confirmed that James's sudden disappearance-it can be judged This movie is indeed based on the theme of time travel.
2.
The definition of reality and illusion
James' spirit does have a problem.
Although the part of the time travel was confirmed to be real, Terigi Liem had been setting smoke bombs during this period.
First of all, the sudden sound can basically be judged to be from James' brain. This sound basically only sounded when James was alone. The only exception occurred at 115 minutes of the film. When James opened the toilet door and a strange fat man appeared, it was already certain that the source of the sound was himself.
Time travel does bring great pressure, and even those with tough will inevitably suffer from mentally disorder.
It can be seen from the conversation between Jose and James at the airport that the old beggar’s words about his teeth were just nonsense, but James, who lost his sense of reality, mistakenly took these words as facts and knocked out his teeth. . . .
Of course, the old beggars in movies are always mysterious, and it's not surprising that Terry Gilliam has another set here.
3. The
movie cleverly bypasses the grandfather's paradox. Almost no past facts have been changed.
The scientist in the movie is sane. From the very beginning, James’ mission was not to stop the virus from spreading, but to collect information for future scientists to develop vaccines and make remedies in the “later” world. In other words, there was no plan to prevent the deaths of 5 billion people from the beginning.
So what changes did his time travel bring about?
First, he changed Jeffrey's mind. It can be said that he gave Jeffrey the plan of the Twelve Monkey Army in his mind.
But the Twelve Monkey Army is just a crazy animal protection organization, and their plan is to keep Nobel scientists in cages. Of course they have indeed succeeded in the past and now. The trick is that James never directly let Jeffrey have the idea of putting his father in a cage, that is to say, the synthesis of this idea is still in Jeffrey's own mind from beginning to end. This minimizes the changes brought about by time travel.
So, is the idea of the real murderer, the scientist's assistant, brought about by James' time and space shuttle?
It can be seen that this assistant had an obsessive belief in the "Kassandra Complex" as early as 1996 when Kathryn was speaking at the university. The material for this speech began in the fourteenth century and ended in 1920 with Jose's photos during the First World War. Even Jose is also a space-time traveler, and his role here is only a corroboration in the speech, and it does not have a major impact on the reality of 1996.
In this way, the movie bypassed the grandfather's paradox in the general direction-the virus spread in 1996 was not caused by the time travel of James or Jose.
4.
The virus has indeed been spread, and 5 billion people will die.
This point will continue to the third point. Since scientists have never tried to prevent the spread of the virus, it is certain that the virus has been spread in the world after the shuttle.
The most direct shot is that the assistant scientist in the airport opens the test tube containing the virus. This shot is extraordinarily long and detailed.
In addition, at about 89 minutes of the movie, future scientists mentioned when examining James that the order of virus spread was "Philadelphia, San Francisco, New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, Kinshasa, Karachi, Bangkok, Beijing" at 115 minutes. The travel route of the murderer was "San Francisco, New Orleans...", which shows that the initial spread of the virus was indeed in this airport.
So what happened to the female scientist who sat next to the real murderer in the end?
Her lines here are very interesting. If "We are the next endangered species. Human beings." may just be a coincidence of the director's mystery, the sentence "I'm in insurance" is enough to show that she is also a time traveler-she is a scientist ! Not an insurance company!
In this kind of completely casual conversation, the possibility of her deliberately lying that she is an insurance company can be ruled out. The phrase "I'm in insurance" can only be read as "she is a double insurance for James to be shot to stop data collection".
This also explains the phrase "If only they could have got your message earlier" that Jose said at 117 minutes and half. His regret refers to James' death within a few minutes after he can meet.
The story is now in a chain-scientists collected information and went back, and a large number of humans died. In the future, scientists will use the collected information to make a vaccine to save the remaining 1% of humanity.
To put it aside, if the movie time of this kind of disaster prediction movie is after the shooting time, it is very likely that the prediction will come true and humans will die on a large scale, such as Roland Emmerich’s acquired day. If the movie time is before the shooting time, it is very likely that the whole mankind was saved by which little person without knowing it. This result is far more than the first one, and it most often appears in various classic American hero movies/Superman movies.
This should be purely set by the director based on the consideration of the reality of the movie. The only movie I have seen that violates this setting and has received rave reviews is Quentin Tarantino's shameless bastard. Let us pay tribute to this wizard.
6.
The last extension of the movie's rationality-why people in the future didn't save James. (Of course, first of all, he is a prisoner. Put aside the question of whether it is worth saving.) People in the
future did not want to save the 5 billion people in the past. It's not that they are all cold-blooded demon, but that the scientists in this movie abide by the basic reason-not to change the past. (I really don't understand why scientists want to change the past in many movies... This is really the most basic taboo!) The
director explained this rationality through Jose's lines: the scientists did not get James's message at the airport in time.
This explanation is based on a very simple fact: in both worlds, time extends in parallel at the same speed. So the scientists got the information after re-synthesizing the tapes after some time. During this time difference, James, who they sent back to the past, was ready to be sent to death. Since they have no intention of changing the deaths of 5 billion people, of course they have no intention of saving a space-time traveler.
So Jose said to James in the movie that he regretted not hearing this call earlier, he already knew what James would end in a few minutes. (Well, I seem to hit this sentence for the second time... Why am I so wordy OTZ)
5. A
few movie details to enjoy.
First of all, I must say that I don't like the ingenuity of the movie editing. I think excessive editing is a "cheating method" used by the director to make the movie look diverse when the story structure is not compact enough. The most typical one is Nolan's movie memory fragments... it's far away...
What I want to mention here is the clue details that the director deliberately scattered in the movie.
At 44 minutes, at the beginning of Kathryn’s speech "Madness and Apocalyptic Visions", she mentioned the myth in the apocalypse, "The Golden Cup of Four Monsters and Seven Angels." At 63 minutes, a street evangelist happened to be there. Tell this myth. The preacher said to James "You! You are one of us!"
(In terms of rationality, it can be understood as a move by the preacher to interact with the audience.) The
Apostle John tells the church about the God he saw with his own eyes. The story of the scourge that fell,
Terrigilliam, compares James to a prophet, walking through the predictions of diseases and disasters.
Two large-scale clues that have repeatedly appeared in TV shows:
One is Florida Island. James's continuous exposure to this advertisement, plus he has never seen the sea, finally determined the island of Florida as the destination of his trip, and also led us to the end of the movie-the airport.
The other is a little boy locked in a barn by his partner. This closely tracked news is a cue point in time. Not only is it a testament to James' "time travel", it is also a turning point in Kathryn's change of attitude.
Weird chorus of scientists:
This is actually a testament to James' mental instability.
After being hypnotized by the drug and between being awake, the brain blurs the boundary between reality and illusion, and automatically blends many intentions. Here James mixes the scientists at the bedside with his favorite music in his mind. The funny speed of the scientists after that was also James' subjective feeling when he was not awake.
In the dreams that James kept replaying:
In the initial replays of the dreams, the faces of the woman and the dead man were not clearly given, and the murderer did not appear.
As James continued to check bit by bit, the dream became more and more fulfilling and rich. The face of the prisoner appears (and it is the image of Brad Pitt), the face of the woman (the image of Kathryn) appears, the close-up of the dead man...
This is of course because the 8-year-old James was stimulated, but it is still a long time away. Fuzzy memory does not remember accurately. Kathryn's lines clearly gave the clue: "It wasn't me before, James, It's become me now because of what's happening". This explains why the murderer appeared in the dream with the face of Brad Pitt in the first place. .
Of course, Kathryn's face is actually Kathryn himself, which is actually a coincidence, not a necessity.
In the ending, Kathryn realized that it was a miracle that the kid was James...
there are beautiful close-ups...so who cares about this unreasonable place?
View more about 12 Monkeys reviews
