Twelve Monkeys

Twelve Monkeys (1995) is a science-fiction thriller from Terry Gilliam that you can watch online on iFILM. By 2035 a virus has erased most of humanity, and the survivors huddle in tunnels below the ruined surface.

Scientists send the convict James Cole back through time to trace where the plague began. Bruce Willis plays a man dragged across the decades against his will, and the machine keeps overshooting its mark, dropping him in the wrong year. Mistaken for a madman, he lands in a psychiatric ward, where Dr. Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe) first diagnoses him and then starts to wonder if he is right. Twitching at the edges of the story is patient Jeffrey Goines, the role that won Brad Pitt a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination.

Gilliam built the film out of Chris Marker's short La Jetée, a tale told almost entirely in still photographs, and stretched it into a jittery puzzle about memory and fate. The closer Cole gets to the truth behind the Army of the Twelve Monkeys, the more it feels like the ending was written long ago. Stream Twelve Monkeys (1995) online on iFILM.