10 Sci-Fi Movie Endings No One Understands

10. 12 Monkeys - What Was The Point Of Time Travelling?

Released in 1995, Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys may be one of the perpetually studio-stifled former Python’s most beloved films.

However, like his equally acclaimed earlier effort Brazil, it’s also one of the filmmaker’s bleakest hours. The film follows our potentially insane hero Cole after an epidemic wipes out much of the world. Sent too far back in time and ending up in an asylum, he attempts to inform himself of the danger in order to stop the tragedy ever occurring.

However, Cole is soon stuck being bounced back and forth between intersecting timelines in a story which becomes more bizarre and byzantine the further it progresses. By the end of the film our nominal hero is dying in front of his younger self, embodying a nightmare he’s had throughout the movie.

But… Why?

Why send him back if he was doomed to repeat this fate? What would have happened if he hadn’t gone back? What was the point?

This knotty, complex film posits that you can change what you take from the past, even if you can’t alter what happened back then through an uncompromisingly bleak and convoluted plot.