Now in the movies the future has succumbed to rot and decay. Tomorrow isn't made out of stainless steel and glass anymore, it's more like a compost heap of iron and dirt and, according to Waterworld, fish skin. Maybe because most people have at least casual contact with computers, it's become obvious that they don't represent the power we once imagined they might. Instead of humans committing the sin of making gods out of machines, in the current futureworld of organic rot, God sweeps down in the form of nature and gives us our retribution directly. The key force governing Hollywood's fearful visions of the future has switched from progress to divinely inspired entropy.

One of the most sinister cinematic visionaries of the future is Terry Gilliam, who combines a decomposing vision of the future with the old-style depersonalization of the clean-and-shiny school of sci-fi. In Brazil and now in 12 Monkeys, Gilliam paints a scary picture of a quasi-SM future where people live in cages and everything's made of rubber and rusted chain. Prisoners and citizens are watched over by barely human bureaucrats who are obsessed with the rules of the state. What could be more terrifying than a decaying world governed by people who act like machines?

In 12 Monkeys, the unlucky prisoner Cole (Bruce Willis) has been forced to live in the dirty underground future with the rest of humanity since a plague in the year 1996 made the surface of the planet uninhabitable. In order to get a pardon, Cole "volunteers" to do research. "Volunteering" is what they call it when a big hook is lowered into his cell and he's fished out; "research" is when he's flung haphazardly back in time. He lands in various epochs, but mostly in the 1990s, where, of course, everyone thinks he's insane.

And maybe he is. There's something about Gilliam's films that remind me of Pink Floyd--his obsession (here, as in The Fisher King and Brazil) with madness and the question of who's actually insane in this crazy world (the lunatic is on the grass); a sense, in his characters imprisoned by bureaucrats resembling stern headmasters, of the inescapability of the social hierarchy thrust onto us at school (all in all you're just another brick in the wall); and his use of complexity for the sake of complexity (Dark Side of the Moon, for starters).

Maybe because to me, Pink Floyd represents seventh grade, there's something I find reminiscent of adolescence and pot smoke in this particular constellation of themes. Still, if any place is right for adolescent themes, it's a sci-fi movie, which--despite the fact most of it takes place in 1996--is essentially what 12 Monkeys is. And it's a good, swift, weird one, with a complicated plot that twists around in time and a love story thrown in for good measure. Willis is great as the time traveler Cole; he exudes both the determination of a hero and the dull vulnerability of a patient. But, as in most sci-fi movies, it's really the sets--the overall look of the movie--that steal the show. Gilliam's vision of Philadelphia, devoid of people and populated by beasts, is absolutely haunting.

12 Monkeys is based on La Jetée, a short French film by Chris Marker made in 1962. La Jetée is a beautiful, unusual film about a prisoner of war subjected to medical experiments that send him back in time. It's interesting how in 1962 Marker envisioned an end of the world delivered by nuclear bombs whereas Gilliam posits a different (and my personal favorite) end-time scenario: mass death by plague. Marker implies in La Jetée that the end is simply a tragedy whereas Gilliam (in a screenplay by Janet and David Webb Peoples, who also wrote Blade Runner) hints that maybe, just maybe, we deserve it.