Every Version of Twelve Monkeys

The still image that started everything

The Twelve Monkeys story begins not with a novel or a comic but with a 28-minute French film made almost entirely from still photographs. In 1962, director Chris Marker released La Jetee, a science-fiction meditation on memory, time, and the trap of nostalgia, told in black-and-white photo-montage with sparse voiceover narration. It follows a prisoner in a post-apocalyptic Paris who is sent backward and forward through time because of his obsessive attachment to a single image from his childhood: a face seen on a jetty at Orly Airport. The film is barely 1,500 feet of celluloid and contains exactly one moving image, a woman opening her eyes. Nothing else in science fiction of that length has left a longer shadow.

In 1995, Terry Gilliam adapted the core premise into Twelve Monkeys, a full feature that transplanted the action to Philadelphia and Baltimore, gave the protagonist a name (Cole), surrounded him with Brad Pitt's manic performance and Madeleine Stowe's psychiatrist, and expanded the conspiracy into an eco-terrorism plot. The film was a commercial and critical success, and became the version most people encountered first. Then in 2015 the Syfy network took the same bones and stretched them across four seasons of television, reworking the timeline mechanics into something far more elaborate and serialized. The story has now existed in three distinct formats across six decades, each one using the time-loop structure to different emotional ends.