My first actual virus movie during the pandemic

While cinephiles, or just regular people, were flocking to the likes of Contagion and Outbreak way back in the early days of the pandemic -- remember March? -- I apparently preferred my cinematic considerations of our current situation to be more metaphorical, like The Platform and Vivarium.

Well, on day whatever-it-is, I've finally gotten to an actual virus movie.

Twelve Monkeys started percolating around in my brain for reasons I can't remember a week or two ago. It has been 11 years since I'd seen it, and it's also a movie that's lodged in my top 100 on Flickchart (currently #86), so with all the Flickcharting I've been doing lately, I've seen its poster come up a bunch of times. I'd never actually watched the DVD copy I bought a couple years ago, and I decided it was time to see if it really deserves to hold such a lofty position in my personal rankings.

Plus, you know, the whole virus thing.

Twelve Monkeys is not your typical virus movie. There's nary a moment when you see someone succumbing to the effects of the virus, which makes it quite unusual among virus movies you would actually tag with that label. But the virus is one of the first things you hear about in the movie in the opening text. Even if it's more like a background to the movie and an eventuality the heroes are trying to prevent -- even if they kind of know they can't -- it's still essential to what Twelve Monkeys is.

But because the virus is always something either in the characters' past or in their future, Twelve Monkeys didn't specifically scratch a virus itch for me. I enjoyed watching it, though I was a bit in and out, a consequence of it being Friday night after a long week working from home (ha) and, probably more pertinently, of having done a 46-minute run after work ended.

As much as I still like the movie, though, it does seem clear that it's probably not my 86th favorite movie of all time. Somewhere in the top 100 to 200 range -- maybe closer to 200 -- is probably more accurate. And that's another reason revisiting movies like this is useful, as in my future Flickcharting, it might lose to some movies it was previously beating, which will get it closer to that proper spot.

I think part of the reason it scaled to those heights was that it was that particular catnip for a particular type of cinephile: the perfectly timed head trip movie. Everyone has some. For millennials, maybe it was when Inception came out in 2010. For me, at the ripe old age of 46, it was when Twelve Monkeys came out in 1995, not long after I'd turned 22. It was one of them, anyway.

My 2009 viewing probably chilled a little of my affection for the movie, though obviously not enough to knock it down significantly in Flickchart. (I think it may have been as high as the 40s at one point.) My 2020 viewing will probably further contextualize it for me in terms of my actual all-time favorites.

Another reason I'd been interested in revisiting Twelve Monkeys is that I saw the source material from which it was adapted, Chris Marker's La Jetee, two years ago. I probably really needed to watch them back-to-back, though, as now I have forgotten enough about La Jetee to have it significantly inform last night's Twelve Monkeys viewing, just as I had forgotten enough about Twelve Monkeys for it to have meaningfully spoken to La Jetee two years ago. Oh well, opportunity missed.

One thing I did gain from this most recent viewing, in addition to all the things that had given me pleasure previously, was to note how many actors appear in it that I didn't know at the time, though know much better now. For one, two members of the Army of the 12 Monkeys are Lisa Gay Hamilton and Matt Ross, she of any number of films and he of Silicon Valley. Then you've got a young Christopher Meloni as a detective. These people had careers before I was aware of them? How rude!

It was interesting to watch this with an awareness of the cancel culture that has come to surround Terry Gilliam, who has made any number of unfortunate statements in recent years. I won't dredge those up to see if any of them were racially unfortunate, but I couldn't help feel a bit icky about the portrayal of the black characters in this movie. I don't think these were the only black characters, but suffice it to say that there were at least three whose portrayal is problematic by today's standards. For one there is the asylum orderly, who seems to be the Nurse Ratched of this place. He has a ringleader quality to him and seems a bit sadistic, handling Bruce Willis' James Cole very roughly. Then there's the ex-con Cole beats to death, who had been trying to rape Madeleine Stowe's Katherine Railly. Finally Cole has an intense argument with a black female airport worker, who won't let him past. While that's her job, the film makes clear to show how much attitude she gives him. These may have just been accidents, and in 1995 we certainly weren't looking for those things the way we do today, but they don't play so hot 25 years later.

One last thing to report is that this viewing has inspired me to change how I refer to the movie. I had always written the title as 12 Monkeys, and that is indeed how it appears on most of the posters. (You will see I specifically selected a poster where that is not the case.) In the actual movie, though, the title appears as Twelve Monkeys, which must be said to represent the truest interpretation of the intentions of Terry Gilliam et al. It's the same argument as in the case of David Fincher's Se7en, and I finally gave in on that one as well. So I've gone in and changed how I spell it in my various lists. I've even changed the spelling on the tag you see below, which had one previous usage (back when I wrote about La Jetee two years ago).

Now that we are past the initial coronavirus panic -- and have flattened the curve quite well here in Australia, with still fewer than 100 dead in the whole country -- I may no longer feel as compelled to watch a proper virus movie. And with a possible easing of local restrictions as soon as May 11th, the future depicted in Twelve Monkeys seems a little less closer to becoming reality.