Un lungo articolo pubblicato su The Ringer racconta la storia dietro la realizzazione del film di Terry Gilliam L’esercito delle 12 scimmie.

There is a scene toward the end of 12 Monkeys in which James Cole sits in a 24-hour movie theater watching Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Cole, played by Bruce Willis, is not entirely certain whether he is a prisoner who “volunteered” to time travel from a future when 99 percent of the world’s population has been killed in a pandemic and the survivors live underground because the surface air is deadly, or whether he is just a man with a serious dissociative disorder. Next to him, applying a fake mustache to his face, is Dr. Kathryn Railly (played by Madeleine Stowe), his once doubtful psychiatrist who has become his coconspirator in investigating a group run by Jeffrey Goines (played by Brad Pitt) called the Army of the 12 Monkeys and their role in unleashing the virus on the planet.

Examining Kim Novak and James Stewart on screen, Cole is confused and agitated, his mind either scrambled by the effects of time travel or just in its natural state. He thinks he’s seen the movie before, maybe on TV when he was a kid, but something about it feels both familiar and unfamiliar. “It’s just like what’s happening with us,” he tells Railly. “Like the past, the movie never changes. It can’t change, but every time you see it, it seems different, because you’re different. You see different things.”

Arriving in select theaters at the end of 1995 before getting a wide release 25 years ago this week, 12 Monkeys was an immediate commercial success. Directed by Terry Gilliam, it was the middle installment of the three movies the iconoclastic filmmaker made for major American studios during the ’90s. But audiences quickly began to see 12 Monkeys differently.

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