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‘12 Monkeys’: Why Terry Gilliam’s Movie Is Relevant Today

163 points by colinprince 8y ago

eternalban 8y ago
The catastrophe in 12 Monkeys is due to the action of a single individual - an ideologue concerned with the "biosphere". The pathology highlighted is ideological thought that justifies mass murder. Love certainly conquers all in this film. It is precisely love (here romantic love) that weaves an unalterable thread through time and binds the two individuals who are absolutely necessary for the future salvation of mankind. "I’ve been thinking about 12 Monkeys a lot lately. It seems, these days, as though the human race has passed a Rubicon and is now on a straight path toward the end of days, or at least the end of the social order as we know it." - the OP. "[I]sn’t it obvious that chicken little represents the sane vision? And that homo sapiens’s motto, ‘Let’s go shopping,’ is the cry of the true lunatic?” - the mass murdering virologist.
- sametmax 8y ago
  I've rewatched the movie recently. Humanity is definitly not saved. The whole quest is shown as being nothing a but a futile yet beautiful slice of life. It's espacially underlined with the scene revealing the origin of the voice mail that was supposedly the only clue of the whole shebang for the future scientists.
  - dnautics 8y ago
    Isn't humanity saved? The main character's buddy from prison is able to show up to try to save him because greatly improved the tech; he claims that mc is a hero and things are headed to being solved?
    - Thaxll 8y ago
      The whole thing for that movie is he couldn't save humanity by going back in time.
      - taeric 8y ago
        I thought it was that he couldn't prevent the catastrophe. It is greatly implied that he found the cause and set the future scientists up to get a direct sample of what caused things, possibly reversing it in their time. What he couldn't do, was get what he wanted. He couldn't save his love, as she was of that time, and it was doomed.
        dnautics 8y ago
        Part of this is because he had proven that you could bring back a useful biological sample, by eating a spider in the early parts of the movie
    - nabla9 8y ago
      Not in the movie. They definitely can't change the past. They live in block universe where there is only one timeline that happens no matter what. They can only travel into the past and observe and bring some stuff back. mc is a hero because he discovers the real villain and sends message to the future. The idea is to get sample of the original non-mutated virus and develop a cure in the future so that they can live on the surface again, not to prevent the outbreak. The movie ends without a cure, but now the future scientists know who the villain is, so they might send other people to intercept the villain when he lands.
      - jlawson 8y ago
        I think the idea was that the woman scientist "in insurance" in the plane at the end was in fact the next agent working on getting the pre-mutated virus. She knew to go back to that time and get on that seat of that plane because Cole's actions pinpointed the target, time, and place.
        nabla9 8y ago
        Ah, yes. I forgot that. There is in fact plot already going on in the last scene.
        eternalban 8y ago
        Precisely. They have found the source, can take samples at each stop, and "get people back on top" post Cole.
- tokyodude 8y ago
  Did you watch some alternate edit? Love conquers nothing in the film.
  - eternalban 8y ago
    Cole has no reason to seek Railly on his second time jump. He seeks her because he is in love with her. Railly also makes decisions contrary to cold reason and sticks with Cole. Don't forget, they had sent multiple agents back in time. None had succeeded. The romantic relationship is a key element of the narrative.
    - tokyodude 8y ago
      I guess that's not what I got out of it. He sought to get back to 1996 because she convinced him the rest of his experience in the future was an delusion. Railly has experiences that challenge her idea of reality. At first she believes Cole is insane but then experiences evidence that he's not. Now believing the plague Cole mentioned is coming she really has no one else.
cam_l 8y ago
If you have not seen it, highly recommend the original film this was based on, La Jette as mentioned in the article. It is a (shortish) masterpiece of French SciFi, all in black and white, shot almost entirely in still scenes, and fully narrated. And i would argue it does follow fairly closely in terms of script and meaning to the remake than the article suggests. It is much more subtle and nuanced. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Jet%C3%A9e https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Jet%C3%A9e
- rasz 8y ago
  La Jette reminds me of another under appreciated french movie Le Dernier Combat. Double first for Luc Besson and Jean Reno.
  - gilbetron 8y ago
    A very disturbing PA movie, an amazing portrayal of the desolation and loneliness in that situation.
- StavrosK 8y ago
  La Jetée
- rapsey 8y ago
  Thank you for this. It is on youtube and absolutely amazing.
- culot 8y ago
  Also peep 'La Puppe', a fun parody of Marker's film: https://youtu.be/Ln2bt-PRnSY https://youtu.be/Ln2bt-PRnSY
tunap 8y ago
While I loved 12 Monkeys story & most of TG's body of work, I must posit "Brazil" is more relevant in our non-fiction world than anything else he has done. I hesitate to note the multitude of similarities to our current state of information retrieval & bureaucracies. Zero Theorem seemed to touch the needle but sorta fizzled out mid-way(IMO). Yes, I did not RTFA.
- booleandilemma 8y ago
  Do you at least have a 27B/6?
- thanosnose 8y ago
  Agreed. I like 12 monkeys better as a movie ( just my style of movie ) but brazil is a far more realistic dyspotian reality. Dystopia by the mundane and the bureaucratic rather than a mad genocidal scientist.
- 52-6F-62 8y ago
  I have to admit I still haven’t seen Brazil but it’s been on the to-Watch list for a long time. Zero Theorem just managed to depress the hell out of me for a week or so.
  - hnmonkey 8y ago
    Oh you should. It's a great movie. Absolutely weird and surreal but great. Some of the themes you'll pick up from it are pervasive across tons of other movies and genres all condensed into one wild ride.
  - justin66 8y ago
    The thing you have to know about Brazil is, it's perfectly okay not to like Brazil at all. I can't call a movie most people have never seen "overrated," but people can get really weird about Brazil...
ctdonath 8y ago
"the ’90s, that bizarre blip in American history where it seemed like we were living in an eternal present, the End of History" That's something millennials & later won't understand: 2000 was a mental barrier we couldn't really think past. Objectively, people may have addressed the next millennium's dates, but we just couldn't deeply believe we'd be living in what was always colloquially called "the future".
- dana321 8y ago
  Y2K had everyone spooked and everyone thought that all the machines would stop, looking back on it seems funny now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_apocalyptic_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_ap...
  - ctdonath 8y ago
    That threat was real, and an example of how concerted objective efforts could fix it. Unfortunately, many people seem to think a risk is only real if something goes wrong; successful mitigation seems to mean the risk wasn't real.
- api 8y ago
  I have a very different take. As someone who grew up in the 90s I draw the line at 9/11. That event ended the brief post cold war era of peace, prosperity, and optimism. We still have not recovered culturally from 9/11. The optimism of the 90s is literally unthinkable today. The terrorists won.
  - ta_egdhs 8y ago
    idk why this is downvoted. the 90s is the period between the end of the cold war and the start of the war on terror. its the only time in living memory where there was no enemy. 9/11 absolutely changed the country. it was the start of militarized police, nationalistic displays, and 24/7 fear that have all been normalized today. Perhaps the terrorists didn't win (Bin Laden is dead and the house of Saud still stands) but we certainly lost.
Cyph0n 8y ago
If you’re interested in a more in-depth look at the 12 Monkeys universe, check out the excellent TV series of the same title.
- morganvachon 8y ago
  As the article stated though, they aren't really the same story and don't share continuity. The show is good but it's not an adaptation of the film in any meaningful way.
  - adetrest 8y ago
    Exactly, the show was ok but the film is much better. While the show takes place in a similar universe, it's not a continuity.
    - hackinthebochs 8y ago
      The opposite is true to me. The film was OK, but the show was excellent.
      - stevenwoo 8y ago
        I rewatched both 12 Monkeys the film and Brazil and they both share an incredibly unbelievable romance - in the first the scientist falls in love with a homeless man and kisses him passionately over the span of about 10 minutes of screen time after thinking he was insane and finding proof he was a time traveler (homeless people are humans, too, but if Cole had been living like a homeless person long enough to appear like that he would have had a pretty foul odor) and in Brazil, Sam Lowry and the female lead are arguing and he singled handedly ends her career and in the next(?) scene we see them together they are in bed pre/post consummation ( though of course that scene makes more sense if it's only in his head after we watch the end of the movie). The TV series also manages to top Brad Pitt's crazy guy, that I thought was going to be impossible after hearing about the TV series initially.
  - Cyph0n 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
AJRF 8y ago
"I’ve been thinking about 12 Monkeys a lot lately. It seems, these days, as though the human race has passed a Rubicon and is now on a straight path toward the end of days, or at least the end of the social order as we know it." This feels a little unsubstantiated. Historically speaking, this is the greatest time on earth to be alive. This pessimism is toxic and unrealistic.
- DennisP 8y ago
  Historically speaking, the best time to own Bitcoin was back in January. Things always look great at the top of a bubble. CO2 is higher than in the past several million years and we're still adding more at our usual pace. We've killed 60% of wild vertebrate life since 1970, wiped out a large percentage of the insect population, and we're continuing the practices that caused that as well. None of this can go on forever. Almost everybody misses the main finding of the Club of Rome study: if you model a simple assumption that resources get more expensive to extract over time and environmental destruction gets more expensive to deal with, you don't get a gradual decline. You get continued improvement up to a peak, and then it suddenly crashes down. What's really toxic: enjoying that run up to the peak and assuming everything's fine, instead of buckling down and fixing the problems before it's too late.
  - crispyambulance 8y ago
    Well put. The ironic thing about all numbers-oriented folks in extractive enterprises (regardless of whether they're extracting natural resources, capital, or labor), is their blind spot to the fact that ALL resources are finite. There's no "free-refill" when the big-gulp runs out.
    - ewhanley 8y ago
      I can only speak to the minerals extraction industry (oil & gas, specifically), but they (we) are well aware that hydrocarbons are a finite resource. The industry as a whole is arguably short sighted, but it’s not because they think the supply of oil is endless.
rossdavidh 8y ago
So, perhaps the author is correct about the film's ending, but that's not the way I interpreted it when I first saw it. Rather, it seemed to me that the scientist from the future was there to insure that the disease did, in fact, spread, even if Bruce Willis' character stopped the original source from getting on the plane. She was either a carrier (a Typhoid Mary of sorts), or else had her own vial. I thought it suggested that some of the scientists in the future were in favor of the status quo, and wanted to sabotage the plans of the majority of the scientists to alter the past. But, perhaps my interpretation was overly cynical.
- dudul 8y ago
  I'm glad I read this article because I never understood the ending that way. I'm probably kind of dumb, but for me, the scientist at the end, on the plane, was just there as part of the normal timeline. I never imagined that she travelled from the future, I thought it was just her character before the epidemic :)
  - jghn 8y ago
    This is so interesting as I'd always interpreted "insurance" as her being there to stop the plague. I never considered either of your views nor the one in the article. Now that I see there are so many possible interpretations it really gives some fuel for thought.
    - jasonlotito 8y ago
      She can't stop the plague. They can't change that. It's well established. She can't help the plague. It doesn't need help. This is also well established. However, the whole point of sending Cole back was to find out where they could get a clean version of the specimen. The earliest version of it. He succeeded. She's the "insurance" on this whole thing. She can get a sample of the virus so they can create a cure.
      - dudul 8y ago
        I think this is the most plausible meaning yes. My reading was pretty naive. As for the "I work in insurance" part, I always thought it was her job before the plague, and maybe it meant that the caste of "scientists" who were ruling in the future were actually mostly con-people, self-proclaimed "scientists" who took advantage of the collapse to take control. It doesn't really make sense in a way, they invented time travel after all. In my defense, I saw this movie when I was pretty young so most likely missed a lot of subtleties.
ryanwaggoner 8y ago
It seems, these days, as though the human race has passed a Rubicon and is now on a straight path toward the end of days, or at least the end of the social order as we know it. Is there some name for the phenomenon that as things get better, our assessment of where things stand seems to get more and more pessimistic? I feel like you see this in issues of racial and gender equality as well. Things are so much better than they were 100 years ago, but even as I write that, I'm tempted to pre-empt it with an acknowledgement that things are still terrible, because I know that I'm going to get a bunch of comments about how bad race and gender relations are today. And those comments are not wrong, but they ignore the context of all the progress that's been made. There will always be some kind of crisis and existential risk looming for some or all of civilization, but the more objectively better things get, the more disinclined we seem to be to acknowledge the progress that's been made. Why is that? Don't get me wrong, climate change is horrific. But for almost the entire second half of the last century, we faced the very real threat of nuclear annihilation at any moment. It's terrifying how close we came to that tipping point. For the first half of the last century, we had two global wars that killed tens of millions of people and whose outcomes were not certain. When I read the history of World War I and II, I'm struck by how easily things could have gone differently and perhaps left us with a much worse world than the one we face today. So while climate change is a huge problem, I think it's preferable to all-out nuclear war. I think we'll figure it out in the long run, not without a lot of suffering and cost, but we have options. Maybe I'm wrong though. Regardless, as soon as we do, there will be some new problem that isn't quite as bad as climate change, and humanity will be as pessimistic as its ever been about our future ability to thrive.
- cf498 8y ago
  Nuclear holocaust would have been caused and was prevented by just a few people. It would have been an action with a direct result. We could and did also just stop with the nonsense. We dont have that option for climate change. We have a worsening situation and no realistic option to stop or even reverse things. Differently put, nuclear holocaust was a threat, climate change an active process.
  - yesenadam 8y ago
tomohawk 8y ago
The message I got from the film is that when people give in to despair, they're prone to take actions that may have catastrophic consequences. The virologist has lost his faith (in whatever he may have had faith in) and has become a nihilist. nihilists are the most dangerous sorts of people, as they're likely to take any action at all, unconstrained by morality, ethics, or common sense.

163 points by colinprince 8y ago

The catastrophe in 12 Monkeys is due to the action of a single individual - an ideologue concerned with the "biosphere". The pathology highlighted is ideological thought that justifies mass murder. Love certainly conquers all in this film. It is precisely love (here romantic love) that weaves an unalterable thread through time and binds the two individuals who are absolutely necessary for the future salvation of mankind. "I’ve been thinking about 12 Monkeys a lot lately. It seems, these days, as though the human race has passed a Rubicon and is now on a straight path toward the end of days, or at least the end of the social order as we know it." - the OP. "[I]sn’t it obvious that chicken little represents the sane vision? And that homo sapiens’s motto, ‘Let’s go shopping,’ is the cry of the true lunatic?” - the mass murdering virologist.

sametmax 8y ago
I've rewatched the movie recently. Humanity is definitly not saved. The whole quest is shown as being nothing a but a futile yet beautiful slice of life. It's espacially underlined with the scene revealing the origin of the voice mail that was supposedly the only clue of the whole shebang for the future scientists.
- dnautics 8y ago
  Isn't humanity saved? The main character's buddy from prison is able to show up to try to save him because greatly improved the tech; he claims that mc is a hero and things are headed to being solved?
  - Thaxll 8y ago
    The whole thing for that movie is he couldn't save humanity by going back in time.
    - taeric 8y ago
      I thought it was that he couldn't prevent the catastrophe. It is greatly implied that he found the cause and set the future scientists up to get a direct sample of what caused things, possibly reversing it in their time. What he couldn't do, was get what he wanted. He couldn't save his love, as she was of that time, and it was doomed.
      - dnautics 8y ago
        Part of this is because he had proven that you could bring back a useful biological sample, by eating a spider in the early parts of the movie
  - nabla9 8y ago
    Not in the movie. They definitely can't change the past. They live in block universe where there is only one timeline that happens no matter what. They can only travel into the past and observe and bring some stuff back. mc is a hero because he discovers the real villain and sends message to the future. The idea is to get sample of the original non-mutated virus and develop a cure in the future so that they can live on the surface again, not to prevent the outbreak. The movie ends without a cure, but now the future scientists know who the villain is, so they might send other people to intercept the villain when he lands.
    - jlawson 8y ago
      I think the idea was that the woman scientist "in insurance" in the plane at the end was in fact the next agent working on getting the pre-mutated virus. She knew to go back to that time and get on that seat of that plane because Cole's actions pinpointed the target, time, and place.
      - nabla9 8y ago
        Ah, yes. I forgot that. There is in fact plot already going on in the last scene.
      - eternalban 8y ago
        Precisely. They have found the source, can take samples at each stop, and "get people back on top" post Cole.
tokyodude 8y ago
Did you watch some alternate edit? Love conquers nothing in the film.
- eternalban 8y ago
  Cole has no reason to seek Railly on his second time jump. He seeks her because he is in love with her. Railly also makes decisions contrary to cold reason and sticks with Cole. Don't forget, they had sent multiple agents back in time. None had succeeded. The romantic relationship is a key element of the narrative.
  - tokyodude 8y ago
    I guess that's not what I got out of it. He sought to get back to 1996 because she convinced him the rest of his experience in the future was an delusion. Railly has experiences that challenge her idea of reality. At first she believes Cole is insane but then experiences evidence that he's not. Now believing the plague Cole mentioned is coming she really has no one else.

cam_l 8y ago

If you have not seen it, highly recommend the original film this was based on, La Jette as mentioned in the article. It is a (shortish) masterpiece of French SciFi, all in black and white, shot almost entirely in still scenes, and fully narrated. And i would argue it does follow fairly closely in terms of script and meaning to the remake than the article suggests. It is much more subtle and nuanced. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Jet%C3%A9e https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Jet%C3%A9e

rasz 8y ago
La Jette reminds me of another under appreciated french movie Le Dernier Combat. Double first for Luc Besson and Jean Reno.
- gilbetron 8y ago
  A very disturbing PA movie, an amazing portrayal of the desolation and loneliness in that situation.
StavrosK 8y ago
La Jetée
rapsey 8y ago
Thank you for this. It is on youtube and absolutely amazing.
culot 8y ago
Also peep 'La Puppe', a fun parody of Marker's film: https://youtu.be/Ln2bt-PRnSY https://youtu.be/Ln2bt-PRnSY

tunap 8y ago

While I loved 12 Monkeys story & most of TG's body of work, I must posit "Brazil" is more relevant in our non-fiction world than anything else he has done. I hesitate to note the multitude of similarities to our current state of information retrieval & bureaucracies. Zero Theorem seemed to touch the needle but sorta fizzled out mid-way(IMO). Yes, I did not RTFA.

booleandilemma 8y ago
Do you at least have a 27B/6?
thanosnose 8y ago
Agreed. I like 12 monkeys better as a movie ( just my style of movie ) but brazil is a far more realistic dyspotian reality. Dystopia by the mundane and the bureaucratic rather than a mad genocidal scientist.
52-6F-62 8y ago
I have to admit I still haven’t seen Brazil but it’s been on the to-Watch list for a long time. Zero Theorem just managed to depress the hell out of me for a week or so.
- hnmonkey 8y ago
  Oh you should. It's a great movie. Absolutely weird and surreal but great. Some of the themes you'll pick up from it are pervasive across tons of other movies and genres all condensed into one wild ride.
- justin66 8y ago
  The thing you have to know about Brazil is, it's perfectly okay not to like Brazil at all. I can't call a movie most people have never seen "overrated," but people can get really weird about Brazil...

ctdonath 8y ago

"the ’90s, that bizarre blip in American history where it seemed like we were living in an eternal present, the End of History" That's something millennials & later won't understand: 2000 was a mental barrier we couldn't really think past. Objectively, people may have addressed the next millennium's dates, but we just couldn't deeply believe we'd be living in what was always colloquially called "the future".

dana321 8y ago
Y2K had everyone spooked and everyone thought that all the machines would stop, looking back on it seems funny now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_apocalyptic_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_ap...
- ctdonath 8y ago
  That threat was real, and an example of how concerted objective efforts could fix it. Unfortunately, many people seem to think a risk is only real if something goes wrong; successful mitigation seems to mean the risk wasn't real.
api 8y ago
I have a very different take. As someone who grew up in the 90s I draw the line at 9/11. That event ended the brief post cold war era of peace, prosperity, and optimism. We still have not recovered culturally from 9/11. The optimism of the 90s is literally unthinkable today. The terrorists won.
- ta_egdhs 8y ago
  idk why this is downvoted. the 90s is the period between the end of the cold war and the start of the war on terror. its the only time in living memory where there was no enemy. 9/11 absolutely changed the country. it was the start of militarized police, nationalistic displays, and 24/7 fear that have all been normalized today. Perhaps the terrorists didn't win (Bin Laden is dead and the house of Saud still stands) but we certainly lost.

Cyph0n 8y ago

If you’re interested in a more in-depth look at the 12 Monkeys universe, check out the excellent TV series of the same title.

morganvachon 8y ago
As the article stated though, they aren't really the same story and don't share continuity. The show is good but it's not an adaptation of the film in any meaningful way.
- adetrest 8y ago
  Exactly, the show was ok but the film is much better. While the show takes place in a similar universe, it's not a continuity.
  - hackinthebochs 8y ago
    The opposite is true to me. The film was OK, but the show was excellent.
    - stevenwoo 8y ago
      I rewatched both 12 Monkeys the film and Brazil and they both share an incredibly unbelievable romance - in the first the scientist falls in love with a homeless man and kisses him passionately over the span of about 10 minutes of screen time after thinking he was insane and finding proof he was a time traveler (homeless people are humans, too, but if Cole had been living like a homeless person long enough to appear like that he would have had a pretty foul odor) and in Brazil, Sam Lowry and the female lead are arguing and he singled handedly ends her career and in the next(?) scene we see them together they are in bed pre/post consummation ( though of course that scene makes more sense if it's only in his head after we watch the end of the movie). The TV series also manages to top Brad Pitt's crazy guy, that I thought was going to be impossible after hearing about the TV series initially.
- Cyph0n 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

AJRF 8y ago

"I’ve been thinking about 12 Monkeys a lot lately. It seems, these days, as though the human race has passed a Rubicon and is now on a straight path toward the end of days, or at least the end of the social order as we know it." This feels a little unsubstantiated. Historically speaking, this is the greatest time on earth to be alive. This pessimism is toxic and unrealistic.

DennisP 8y ago
Historically speaking, the best time to own Bitcoin was back in January. Things always look great at the top of a bubble. CO2 is higher than in the past several million years and we're still adding more at our usual pace. We've killed 60% of wild vertebrate life since 1970, wiped out a large percentage of the insect population, and we're continuing the practices that caused that as well. None of this can go on forever. Almost everybody misses the main finding of the Club of Rome study: if you model a simple assumption that resources get more expensive to extract over time and environmental destruction gets more expensive to deal with, you don't get a gradual decline. You get continued improvement up to a peak, and then it suddenly crashes down. What's really toxic: enjoying that run up to the peak and assuming everything's fine, instead of buckling down and fixing the problems before it's too late.
- crispyambulance 8y ago
  Well put. The ironic thing about all numbers-oriented folks in extractive enterprises (regardless of whether they're extracting natural resources, capital, or labor), is their blind spot to the fact that ALL resources are finite. There's no "free-refill" when the big-gulp runs out.
  - ewhanley 8y ago
    I can only speak to the minerals extraction industry (oil & gas, specifically), but they (we) are well aware that hydrocarbons are a finite resource. The industry as a whole is arguably short sighted, but it’s not because they think the supply of oil is endless.

rossdavidh 8y ago

So, perhaps the author is correct about the film's ending, but that's not the way I interpreted it when I first saw it. Rather, it seemed to me that the scientist from the future was there to insure that the disease did, in fact, spread, even if Bruce Willis' character stopped the original source from getting on the plane. She was either a carrier (a Typhoid Mary of sorts), or else had her own vial. I thought it suggested that some of the scientists in the future were in favor of the status quo, and wanted to sabotage the plans of the majority of the scientists to alter the past. But, perhaps my interpretation was overly cynical.

dudul 8y ago
I'm glad I read this article because I never understood the ending that way. I'm probably kind of dumb, but for me, the scientist at the end, on the plane, was just there as part of the normal timeline. I never imagined that she travelled from the future, I thought it was just her character before the epidemic :)
- jghn 8y ago
  This is so interesting as I'd always interpreted "insurance" as her being there to stop the plague. I never considered either of your views nor the one in the article. Now that I see there are so many possible interpretations it really gives some fuel for thought.
  - jasonlotito 8y ago
    She can't stop the plague. They can't change that. It's well established. She can't help the plague. It doesn't need help. This is also well established. However, the whole point of sending Cole back was to find out where they could get a clean version of the specimen. The earliest version of it. He succeeded. She's the "insurance" on this whole thing. She can get a sample of the virus so they can create a cure.
    - dudul 8y ago
      I think this is the most plausible meaning yes. My reading was pretty naive. As for the "I work in insurance" part, I always thought it was her job before the plague, and maybe it meant that the caste of "scientists" who were ruling in the future were actually mostly con-people, self-proclaimed "scientists" who took advantage of the collapse to take control. It doesn't really make sense in a way, they invented time travel after all. In my defense, I saw this movie when I was pretty young so most likely missed a lot of subtleties.

ryanwaggoner 8y ago

It seems, these days, as though the human race has passed a Rubicon and is now on a straight path toward the end of days, or at least the end of the social order as we know it. Is there some name for the phenomenon that as things get better, our assessment of where things stand seems to get more and more pessimistic? I feel like you see this in issues of racial and gender equality as well. Things are so much better than they were 100 years ago, but even as I write that, I'm tempted to pre-empt it with an acknowledgement that things are still terrible, because I know that I'm going to get a bunch of comments about how bad race and gender relations are today. And those comments are not wrong, but they ignore the context of all the progress that's been made. There will always be some kind of crisis and existential risk looming for some or all of civilization, but the more objectively better things get, the more disinclined we seem to be to acknowledge the progress that's been made. Why is that? Don't get me wrong, climate change is horrific. But for almost the entire second half of the last century, we faced the very real threat of nuclear annihilation at any moment. It's terrifying how close we came to that tipping point. For the first half of the last century, we had two global wars that killed tens of millions of people and whose outcomes were not certain. When I read the history of World War I and II, I'm struck by how easily things could have gone differently and perhaps left us with a much worse world than the one we face today. So while climate change is a huge problem, I think it's preferable to all-out nuclear war. I think we'll figure it out in the long run, not without a lot of suffering and cost, but we have options. Maybe I'm wrong though. Regardless, as soon as we do, there will be some new problem that isn't quite as bad as climate change, and humanity will be as pessimistic as its ever been about our future ability to thrive.

cf498 8y ago
Nuclear holocaust would have been caused and was prevented by just a few people. It would have been an action with a direct result. We could and did also just stop with the nonsense. We dont have that option for climate change. We have a worsening situation and no realistic option to stop or even reverse things. Differently put, nuclear holocaust was a threat, climate change an active process.
- yesenadam 8y ago

tomohawk 8y ago

The message I got from the film is that when people give in to despair, they're prone to take actions that may have catastrophic consequences. The virologist has lost his faith (in whatever he may have had faith in) and has become a nihilist. nihilists are the most dangerous sorts of people, as they're likely to take any action at all, unconstrained by morality, ethics, or common sense.