Response paper on Film 12 Monkeys Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Response paper on Film 12 Monkeys - Essay Example The few survivors are left to live in tunnels underground. The earth is inhabited only by animals and insects which fearlessly wander the planet which is now free of humans. The virus which succeeded in wiping out such a big portion of mankind, apparently, didn’t have any effect on any other forms of life on earth. The main character, a prisoner called James Cole, is about to be sent back in time, to the year of 1996, to get a pure specimen of the virus to make it possible for the scientists of his present, to study the virus and discover a way of reversing the damages caused by it and eradicating it, to make the earth suitable for humans to live in. In the first attempt to travel back to 1996, Cole accidentally ends up in the year of 1990. He gets imprisoned and sent to a mental asylum when he tries to convince those around him that he has come from the future. There he is taken over by psychiatrist, Dr. Kathryn Railly. The people who belong to the present of 1996 are convinced that this man who claims to have come from the future, who believes that a certain virus is going to kill 5 billion people in 1996, is indeed insane. Apart from Dr. Railly nobody is even willing to hear him out. Even though Dr. Railly feels a strange and unexplainable attraction towards Cole, even she is convinced that he is just delusional and whatever he believes to be his reality is just a ‘meticulously constructed fantasy’ of his mind. Cole keeps having recurring dreams of a man being shot dead at an airport and that of a woman running towards the dying man. He sees it through the eyes of a child who is present at the place where the incident takes place. This dream is the link that connects the central theme of the past, the present and the future. The child’s striking resemblance to Cole makes sense only towards the end of the movie. Another inmate of the asylum, Jeffrey Goines, son of a renowned virologist, provides