The year has five days left and, suddenly, here is the best studio release of 1995 — Terry Gilliam’s 12 Moneys — running loose in Multiplex Nation. Can this big, baffling, soulful, even poetic action flick pass for some sort of weird Bruce Willis vehicle, unaccountably open-ended, and set in a funkier-than-usual futuristic dystopia?

The one-tenth of 1 per cent of American moviegoers who are now or have ever been cinema-studies majors might regard 12 Monkeys as a desecration. The script, by Berkeley-based David and Janet Peoples, takes its premise from Left Bank cine-meta-physician Chris Marker’s quasi-canonical 1962 short, La Jetee. A melancholy meditation on temps perdu, presented almost entirely as a succession of freeze-frames, the Marker film is set in the aftermath of a nuclear war and concerns a prison-camp inmate chosen as the subject for an experiment in time travel.

Set some 40 years in the future, 12 Monkeys is similarly postcataclysmic. A viral epidemic wiped out 99 per cent of humanity back in 1996; the survivors huddle in caverns beneath the surface of the earth. As in the Marker film, the imprisoned time traveler (Willis) has been selected for the vividness of his recurring, pre-apocalyptic dreams. Instructed to gather information on the mysterious terrorist band known as the Army of the 12 Monkeys, who are suspected of unleashing the plague, Willis is repeatedly sent back in time.

As befits the movie’s all-over sense of a decrepit, jerry-rigged civilization, Willis’s temporal excursions have an additionally disorienting Jack of exactitude. One trip lands him in the middle of a World War I battlefield, another results in his incarceration in a Philadelphia asylum-rocking, drooling, and watching Tex Avery cartoons on the dayroom TV. It is in this snake pit that he encounters his destined co-stars: a lovely hospital psychologist turned popular authority on millennial madness (the fine and focused Madeleine Stowe) and a flipped-out fellow patient (Brad Pitt) with an ecological obsession and a genetic scientist for a father.

No one in 12 Monkeys is especially rational, but Pitt makes a bravura madman. Twitching and gesticulating, ranting and jabbering, rolling his eyes and lolling his tongue, he’s a fugue in stereotypical behavior. Willis’s character is unstable in another way-vanishing and rematerializing throughout the movie. Set deep in the granite of his shaved head, his liquid, beseeching eyes strain to comprehend what is happening or, perhaps, to push evolution to its next stage. Only a professional brute like Willis could convey such visceral pathos. “I love the music of the 20th century,” he howls, a simian brought to tears by the sound of Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill” on the c radio.

La Jetee is a reverie on loss and memory, the paradox of motion, and the impossibility of representation. 12 Monkeys is a comic celebration of doomsday rhetoric and mental disorder. (It’s as though the Peoples caught a double bill of La Jetee and another early-’60s classic, Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor, and jumbled them up.) Less whimsical and baroque than Gilliam’s previous fantasies, 12 Monkeys is powerfully delusional; using bizarre angles and unexpected camera moves, the director manages to be both inside and outside the various characters’ agitated mental states.

I was no particular fan of Gilliam’s overwrought Brazil, and the futuristic sequences, which suggest the fussy Brazil mise-en-scene, are 12 Monkeys’s least successful element. But, working here mainly with the crumbling civic architecture of Philadelphia’s and Baltimore’s downtowns, he creates a convincing world of skid-row signs and portents. The streets are filled with prophetic derelicts, some of them secret agents from the future with radio transmitters implanted in their teeth. Indeed, the overall consistency of the movie’s musty dilapidation and medical clutter make for some of the most inspired production design since Blade Runner (to cite an earlier Peoples script).

Mainly a careening, stop-start chase, 12 Monkeys achieves ultimate poignance with Willis’s yearning to remain in doomed 1996: “I want to be the present: he begs. But, as La Jetee had wondered, what is the movie-present exactly? In a final act of film-historical hubris, 12 Monkeys turns itself into a mock Hitchcock movie The last reel’s introduction of Vertiqo–another sacrilege for some–not only provides a further twist on the spiral of time but pays additional homage to Marker, who has himself quoted and written most eloquently on this masterpiece of lost, fetishistic love.

Disassociated characters disguise themselves as movie stars, zoo animals escape, dreams come true. A child watches its adult self die. All this and a Bruce Willis shoot-out too? You might even find yourself brushing away a tear as you go shuffling out of the ‘plex and back into the mall.