The camera cuts back to Cole and his friend. Cole says that all the volunteers end up on the 7th floor with their heads messed up. The audience begins to wonder what type of work the volunteers have to do, and who they are working for.
The roof of Cole’s cage slides open. The camera cuts to a very futuristic looking man standing high above the cages, dressed in strange attire, much unlike the apparent prisoners. This man gives us our first taste of the futuristic mise-en-scene that appears throughout the film. The audience can safely assume that this film will contains elements of science-fiction, just through the costume that this character wears. He appears to be quite an important person, with much authority over the people in the cages below. “Volunteer duty.” the man shouts down.
The camera cuts to a close up of a hand pulling on white rubber gloves, like doctors gloves except that these go all the way up the arms. Then we see Cole pulling on a cap of the same material. The camera pulls back to allow us to see Cole sitting on a bench in a strange room, entirely clad in the white rubbery material. We hear a woman’s voice giving instructions through an intercom. She says that all clothing must be sealed and there must be no tears. The audience now knows that Cole will be doing something dangerous and we begin the share his fear.
The camera cuts to a medium close up shot of Cole putting on some strange looking equipment and more head gear. There is eerie, non-diegetic sound in the background to add to the feeling of impending danger. Cole pulls on a plastic all in one suit and looks a bit like an astronaut. He looks over to a window where we see dark shadowy figures that appear to be looking through the glass at him. The mise-en-scene in these shots serves to make clear to the audience that we are in the future. The shots are filled with strange, metal pieces of equipment with many different lights, buttons etc.
Cole begins to walk through a strange metal tunnel, the circular door closes behind him and we are met with blackness for about a second before the camera cuts to the next shot. Here Cole is walking through the tunnel, the camera swivels around to film him from the front. He stops and is showered in a steamy yellow substance. The combination of this, Cole’s strange equipment and the metal tube-like tunnel give the scene a science-fiction feel. We are given a close up of his hand turning a wheel and then the camera shows a light turn from red to green. The audience is given the impression that Cole has done this before as he seems to know exactly what he is doing. The door in front slowly opens to reveal a shadowy, misty space.
We are shown a brief look of Cole looking apprehensive and then the camera tracks him through the door. The next shot shows metal bars moving quickly upwards past a wall, the audience suspect that this is a lift. We are then shown Cole facing the camera in the lift. The camera gives us an alternating feeling of being in the lift one second, and simply observing Cole the next. There is a final close up head shot of Cole looking nervous before the lift ride ends.
Next we are shown a dark place with many pipes around the walls. Down a long passage we see what we assume to be Cole, although it is unclear because of the distance, he has a flashlight and is walking through this sewer type area. The camera then cuts to Cole’s hand fumbling with something and then holding out a map. Cole looks around the place.
The camera cuts to the next shot where, at first, all we can see is a bluish white background. The audience wonders if this is the sky. It’s a pleasant change to the dark, unpleasant underground cavern. We then realize that this blue-white background isn’t the sky; it is snow, because we see Cole’s hand pushing through it and then removing a circular trap door.
Cole’s head appear through the hole and he heaves his equipment out of the sewer and onto the snow. The camera shows us a large building and several abandoned cars. Everything is covered in snow and Cole walks past the building looking around. Everything is silent except for the barely noticeable diegetic sound of his footsteps in the snow. It is clear by now that Cole is our hero, the audience begin to feel for him, fear for him and hope that he comes through good.
The camera cuts to a close up of Cole kneeling down; he opens the case that he was carrying. It contains all sorts of strange contraptions, another example of the futuristic, science-fiction style mise-en-scene that casually litters the film. The camera cuts to show a medium close up of a large insect crawling across a snowy wall. Cole’s hand reaches for it and picks it up. We are shown a close up of Coles face, breathing through special apparatus and observing the insect with apparent interest. He places the beetle in a jar and kneels to put it in his case but is stopped by a sudden load roar right behind him. Eyes wide with horror, he turns to see a large brown bear. His terror is obvious. The audience feels the same; they are scared for him because he is their hero. He quickly tries to get away but his heavy protective clothing makes him clumsy and he stumbles and falls. The bear turns and runs away.
The camera then cuts to a shot of inside a building which we see Cole enter. The audience wonders if this is a church as we see a statue of an angel and then hear the chilling non-diegetic noise of a choir singing Silent Night. Cole’s torch falls on a tennis racket, a Christmas Sale sign and clothes on railings, all perfectly normal things that have been left to collect dust and cobwebs. He sees a web and collects a spider from it. It is clear that this building has been untouched for many years.
Back outside, a high angle shot surveys the snowy scene below it. The absence of any people or movement is eerie, and the audience shares Cole’s feeling of being completely alone. The camera pans down a large building, and as it gets to the bottom we see Cole enter it. The building looks as though it was once important, large pillars are all around and Cole shines his flashlight up a wide sweeping staircase.
Cole leaves the building. Outside again, the camera gives us a low angle shot of a lion walking along the roof of a building. Cole appears to be walking along another roof and the camera films him from the side as he walks. Stopping suddenly, he looks down and sweeps the snow off a sign with his foot. As he does so, strange mysterious non-diegetic music begins to play. Cole wipes more snow away to reveal that the sign shows a red monkey, and below it the words “We did it”. The music reaches its climax as Cole turns to see the lion roar on the roof of the next building.
This opening sequence of Twelve Monkeys clearly displays its main genre types, science fiction and thriller. The science fiction element is clearly displayed through the mise-en-scene of most of the scenes where we are shown unknown, futuristic looking pieces of equipment and the experimenter who is wearing strange clothes with what looks like a red gem in his chest. The thriller genre is given to us by letting us share Cole’s emotions and not quite letting us know what is fully going on, therefore letting many questions spin through the minds of the audience.
If we fit Twelve Monkeys into Toderov’s theory of equilibrium, we would have to assume that the initial equilibrium was the world before the virus was spread causing most of the population to die. This thrusts the world into the disequilibrium that is shown during the opening sequence, the dystopian world of the few survivors forced to live underground with little or no future to hope for. From the opening sequence we can only guess that the work of the ‘volunteers’ may help to restore the world back to equilibrium.
The idea for this sci-fi, psychological thriller came from a French film called ‘La Jetée’ which was made much earlier, in 1962. La Jetée was written and directed by Chris Marker and provided a strong basis for Gilliam’s elaborated and slightly altered Twelve Monkeys.
La Jetée tells the story of a man who, along with fellow survivors, is forced to live underground in the aftermath of a nuclear war which left the surface of the earth uninhabitable. Experimenters begin researching time travel in the hope that they will be able to salvage some kind of future for themselves by traveling back into the pre-war world. The protagonist is a man who is sent back in time because of his memory of a man being shot at Orly airport when he was young.
La Jetée is a very unusual piece of film making as it uses only still shot photography, except for one shot where we see a character blink, and only non-diegetic sound which comes in the form of a voice-over by a narrator.
The storyline of Twelve Monkeys is almost the same as La Jetée, but with a few changes. In Twelve Monkeys, a virus was spread around the world which wiped out almost the entire human race and forced the survivors to live underground. Once again, animals freely roamed the earth and experimenters among the survivors invented a way to time-travel in the hope of being able to stop the virus from being spread by the unknown army of the Twelve Monkeys.