THE TWELVE MONKEYS

Synopsis;
What made the movie work so well? The main answer is in two pieces. First, right from the beginning the only history which is told is the final alternate history, the history of the last ultimately resolved time line. Second, those in the future do not know the entire history, and are sending people back in large part to discover it. Without a temporal viewer of any type, they cannot discover history without changing it, and therefore the history they discover is the one which they have created. The time machine used is a projector/collector set up with spatial coordinates, much like that used in Millennium,......

.....except that the inventors have far less control of it.They send someone back into the past, and then retrieve him. Although they can track much of his movements in the past and pull him back to the future as desired, they cannot confirm the date to which he arrives, and don't seem to require knowledge of the time or place from which he is recovered (an odd system never fully explained; perhaps it is timer-based, allowing the traveler a specified amount of time in the past before recalling him, thus calculating his time from the time of his arrival rather than from the absolute calendar or relationship to the present).

As with Millennium, it is suggested in the film that there have been other time trips before the film opens; in this case, they have been made by other travelers, and will continue to be made concurrently with those of the main character. This strikes me as hazardous temporally--with multiple persons visiting the same point in history from different points in the future, the probability of interaction disrupting the time line grows exponentially. However, they are all on fact-finding missions, sent as observers, so there is very little they will be likely to do to change the world.

It is another aspect of the film that it creates an air of anonymity around many of the players; although a glance at the credits suggests these characters have names, the names of several of them are never mentioned during the film. This enhances the mystery around the history. For example, does anyone know the name of the man who ultimately releases the virus? We know much about who he is and why he did it, but after several viewings specifically looking for it, I am convinced that his name is not mentioned in the script at all. It is lost to us as it is to history, a very nice style device. We will have to call him Dr. Goines' assistant, or just the assistant for short.