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.