In general, I have has major issues with the over simplification of time travel in movies. I feel that one must have sufficient influence to dramatically change the course of history. Now, yes, traveling back in time does have a significant impact. But does stepping on a plant really cause world war 5? How many people felt the loss of that plant? I can hardly believe in its significance (but of course, I do not know everything interacts. However, I have observed some things).The same applies to one insignificant person. I’m not talking about Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand, or someone’s whose death is thought to be a political and personal attack and felt by many people. However, his death was significant because of his influence, what he represented, and because war was imminent. I do not know that, or even believe that, if he had not died, WWI would not have happened. History seems to me to move in a direction of the people, the zeitgeist, the general spirit of people. When so many people believe in a cause, one distraction to that cause does not take away the entire climate for change, whether that is a good or bad thing. And one person whose death only causes immediate suffering in hers or his small sphere of influence does not change the opinions of all.

I do not claim to be a historian, but that many people die daily and our lives go on as normal. Similarly, when something dramatic happens in our own life, it tends to be less dramatic than we originally thought. Things even out to our temperament  I watched a documentary called “Happy” in which a beautiful woman was dragged under her own truck by a relative. She was horribly disfigured. And while she suffered the loss of her looks, her happiness level actually increased as time went on. She accepted her situation. We tend to think that winning the lotto will make us eternally happy. But these riches tend not to be the only factor in our happiness. In fact, it might not increase or reduce our happiness level much in the long run.

Currently, these are the musings off the top of my head. I do not have a fully formed reason for why I find most time travel works obnoxious. It is possible that I am simply annoyed that no proof of correlating relationships can be proved. Yet, I have found one time travel movie that I fully support.

12 Monkeys (Dir. Terry Gilliam, 1995)

A while back I revisited La Jetee by Chris Marker- an excellent film experiment dealing with time travel and civilization. And I then re-watched Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, a movie inspired and based on La Jetee. Terry Gilliam’s stylings do not always match my sensibilities but 12 Monkeys is an excellent time travel movie. One of the best in my opinion.

12 Monkeys seems to me to offer a very mature view on what time travel has an effect on. Bruce Willis plays the lead role of James Cole, a man caught in a time trap to gather information that will possibly change mankind’s destruction.

James Cole has an impeccable memory, which is why he is chosen to travel through time to figure out the mystery of the 12 Monkeys. What humans of the future do know is that mankind destroyed itself with a self created biological disease. The humans left on earth must survive deep underground. And a team of scientists have formed together to prevent this mass destruction of the human race.

They send James Cole to different times in the future to gather clues but from the beginning of this movie he knows that he cannot stop the event from occurring, he simply hopes to learn something that can help scientists find a cure in the future/ his present.

He finds a woman though, a woman who is so important to him. She is ingrained in his dreams, but also, his memories. She is a woman he loves repetitively. He know her when he meets her for the first time. And she knows him. And they struggle together to find a way to survive, for their love to survive, and to keep the world in which they exist. Madness foilows. And how appropriately so. Who is ever sane in love?

They fight, but in the end, we find out it is the same fight. They find themselves caught in a trap, and who knows how many times they have repeated their same mistakes? They cannot change the fact that they do not alter history. They possibly learn and mature themselves, but knowledge gained is in their minds, in their evolution, and not in the effects of history.

How do we escape ourselves? Our own ways of doing things, our thought process? No matter how many times we try to do something different, we always do this thing from ourselves. This is something that we cannot escape.

How many times have we tried to become something we are not, only to fail again in the same way? We feel that we are free, but we move in ways of least resistance. We travel the same ways to work. We have routines to our day. Do we choose not to change them. Yes, but why don’t we change? Possibly because we can only move in certain directions. Physicality has its limitations.

Tolstoy is my influence. I believe this view of history because of his second epilogue in War and Peace, my life guide. If Tolstoy had not taught me this, would I have liked time travel movies? I doubt it. But here I can get caught in the time travel time trap. I did not like many time travel plots from the “beginning”, but my views of history would certainly not be as clear without my guide Tolstoy. And I feel for myself that I would continue to move in the same direction.

The end of 12 Monkeys is one of the most excellent reveals in any movie. It is a movie about becoming self aware and also self aware in love. The strength of the movie is this: that enlightenment is possible, even when changing a situation is not. Some may see this as futile, and maybe it is. But that is not to say it is nihilistic. It is realistic to me, and I am drawn to this. And possibly, now know more of what I believe than I did before 12 Monkeys influenced me. But I’ll remain on course, navigating through physicality and caught in the (so far)  unidirectional way of time.