The Concept of Form and Content in the movie "12 Monkeys"

At the ending scene of the movie "12 Monkeys," James Cole goes to the airport to stop Peters before he spread the virus to another country. He breaks through the security point and he's shot by the police. He dies in Railly's arms. A young James happens to witness his own death.

Throughout the movie, the director's emphasis on James' recurrent dream is important in understanding the ending. A way the director gives emphasis in that dream without revealing the whole picture (and particularly avoiding to reveal that dream as the film ending), is by breaking the dream into pieces of a puzzle. When James starts to have these visions, he barely recognizes any particular thing about it, let alone faces he's seen before (aside of his own as a little boy); moreover, by that time he never got to end it. The next times the dream reveals itself a little longer, lasting longer, at least enough for him to recognize faces...Until he completes the vision and is able to recognize Railly's face.

The vision of that dream serves as a prediction of the new future he's creating, as consequence of altering the past. What's out of the picture in the last scene is himself, sharing a same space of time as his own (young) self. The concept of time traveling revolves around the consequences that changing the past have in the present and future. At the end James did not accomplish his mission, the purpuse of traveling to the past (which was to stop the virus from spreading into the epidemic it becomes in the future). And the attempt costs him his own life. However, even in a movie like this, a common idea about time traveling, it's not possible to turn back time and change events (that already happened) without affecting the future as well...There's always consequences. No matter what, one cannot be twice at the same place and time.

Analysis on "Johnny Mnemonic" (Short Story and Film)

When analyzing the movie on Gibson’s “Johnny Mnemonic” short story, any viewer who’d read the story can tell that it lacks the detailed descriptions and the rich vocabulary used by the author. As matter of fact, the movie has the visual aspect that enables the viewers to experience the story without relying on their imagination; it doesn’t need to engage in further character descriptions other than what people are watching, specially when it comes to characters not directly linked to the main conflict of the story. For example, how the “Magnetic Dog Sisters” are presented differ from short story to film. Originally the author plays with the readers’ imagination as he provides descriptions of these characters in a way that turns out to be different than the readers’ expectations… First, the author alludes to two “Sisters,” giving a sense of a family relationship, and then he mentions they are almost identical “as cosmetic surgery could make them” (with the exception one is white and the other one is black)….and then further the reader discovers it’s more like a transgender-lesbian relationship, as the author reveals they are actually lovers. In the movie, however, the black one is presented as a man dressed as a woman and they are clearly not identical at all, which differs from the description given in the short story. This is an example of how carefully detailed descriptions, whether implicit or explicitly, are presented in the story as opposed to the film, which main focus is the conflict surrounding the main character Johnny Mnemonic in a way that invites viewers not to pay that much attention to characters that are not of much importance within the story and whose identities reveal nothing let alone have any kind of effect on what’s happening to Johnny. However, the main emphasis of the story remains the same as both story and the film presents the audience with themes on artificial intelligence and the overall cybernetic world. 

Welcome Message

Hi everyone! I've created this blog as a space for sharing cyber punk film analysis for my English course on "Topics in Cinema." Hope you all enjoy and have a great semester! ;)