Terry Gilliam

A montage of news clips of Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War protests while The Lennon Sisters cover of "My Favorite Things" plays over them, before cutting to Raoul Duke (Jhonny Depp) and Dr. Gonzo (Benicio Del Toro) speeding across the Nevada desert. Duke, under the influence of mescaline, complains of a swarm of giant bats, before going through the pair's inventory of psychoactive drugs. This included 2 bags of weed, 75 pellets of Mescaline, five sheets of high-powered Blotter acid, a saltshaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers and Laughers. A quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether, and 2 dozen Amyls. Duke was particularly concerned about the ether, as he believed that there was nothing more depraved than a man in the throes of an ether binge. A report comes on the radio about drugs killing American soldiers. Illegal drugs had killed 160 GIs that year, and 40 of them in Vietnam. Shortly afterward, the duo stops to pick up a young hitchhiker (Toby Maguire), although Duke panics and says that they cannot stop in the middle of bat country. Duke begins to get paranoid that the hitchhiker will think they are part of the Manson family, so he decides to explain the situation. Duke has been assigned by an unnamed magazine to travel to Las Vegas and cover the Mint 400 motorcycle race. Mint 400 is the richest off-road race for motorcycles and dune buggies in the history of organized sport. All they had to do is drive to Vegas, check into their suite, and meet their Portuguese photographer named Lacerda. When they were packing for the trip, Gonzo suggests they arm themselves to the teeth. They decide to cover the event through pure Gonzo Journalism. They drive around for a while and argue about the differences between white and Samoan culture. They buy some drugs and shirts, then they haggle over the phone with a salesman for a tape recorder. On their way to the shop, they're delayed on route when a Stingray in front of them kills a pedestrian. Later, they rent a convertible and scare the salesman by driving it backwards at high speeds and stealing his pen. Then they eat some mescaline and go swimming. "Our trip was different, it was to be a classic affirmation of everything right and true in the national character. A gross physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country, but only for those with True Grit." Duke claims that Gonzo is his attorney. The hitchhiker watches each of them take "medicinal" Amyl Nitrite and become completely twisted. Gonzo pretends to be completely confused as to why they are in the desert, then they scare the hitchhiker with crazy stories about their plans to murder the drug dealer "Savage Henry" who ripped them off. The young man soon becomes terrified of the antics of the duo and flees on foot. Trying to reach Vegas before the hitchhiker can go to the police, Gonzo gives Duke a tab of "Sunshine Acid", then informs him that there is little chance of making it before the drug kicks in. Duke wants to reach Vegas before the deadline for the press check-in expires, as else they will have to pay for their suite. By the time they reach the strip, Duke is in full throes of his drug induced hallucinations, and barely makes it through the check-in. The carpet in the lobby appears to be made of living vines that are growing up the walls at an alarming rate. Duke sees a desk clerk turn into a poisonous moray eel before his eyes. Duke is left alone for a minute, the atmosphere of the bar becoming more and more ominous. The floor appears to turn to sticky mud under Duke's shoe. A bowl of snacks in front of him turns into a bowl of worms; a lizard like tongue suddenly shoots into the bowl. Duke turns around and everyone in the lounge turns into giant lizards, all humping, slashing and devouring each other. In the hotel room they order an insane amount of food, including a ton of grapefruit, shrimp cocktails and club sandwiches. Duke still tripping on acid starts watching some war footage and sees a "big machine in the sky, some kind of electric snake, coming straight at us". Lacerda comes to meet them in their suite. Duke on acid to see Lacerda as a jungle commando for an instant with a crazy look in his eyes and bombs going off around him. Gonzo sends him away as Duke is still hallucinating heavily. Gonzo becomes fed up with the war footage and rips the TV cord out of the wall. The next day, Duke arrives at the race and heads out with his photographer Lacerda (Craig Bierko). The race has a winner's prize of $50,000. The race kicks up a lot of dust and Lacerda bundles Duke in a jeep and drives across the course to take pictures, trying different combination of lenses and films to get a shot in the dust. Some guy shakes a dusty rag into Duke's beer. When the race starts, the bikers kick up a lot of dust and make the race impossible to cover. Duke and Lacerda run into some people with machine guns. Duke convinces them that they are "friendlies" and they drive off. Duke's beer turns into mud from all the dust in the air. During the coverage, Duke becomes irrational and believes that they are in the middle of a battlefield, so he fires Lacerda, and returns to the hotel. Duke and Gonzo wind up at a Debbie Reynolds concert. Once they get inside the man tells them there are no seats left. Gonzo threatens the usher with legal action. The man agrees to let them into the concert, but only if they will stand quietly at the back and not smoke. Two seconds after Duke and Gonzo enter the concert, the ushers drag them back out the door, both of them laughing hysterically, and kick them out, knocking over the velvet ropes in the process. After consuming more Mescaline, as well as huffing Diethyl Ether, Duke and Gonzo arrive at the Bazooko Circus casino. Diethyl Ether or Devil Ether. It makes you behave like the village drunkard in some early Irish novel. Total loss of all basic motor skills. Blurred vision, no balance, numb tongue, the mind recoils in horror, unable to communicate with the spinal column. Which is interesting because you can actually watch yourself behaving in this terrible way. They leave shortly afterwards the chaotic atmosphere frightening Gonzo who was just starting to get high on mescaline and was freaking out. Inside the circus, a team of acrobats is putting on an act where they do a mock birthing midair, using oversized scissors, clamps and a hammer, to a doll in a spacesuit with a big American flag on its chest. Below them, on a large net that separates the circus from the casino floor below, a trainer grapples with a snarling wolverine that has just bitten in half a white baton. Below the casino floor is sheer mayhem, a bizarre assortment of brightly-colored attractions, games, and people in weird costumes. They stop at a rotating bar where the waitress asks them to leave when Gonzo asks her if she was paid to have sex with a polar bear. They try to get off the bar, but Gonzo is too paranoid to step off the bar because it's rotating. Duke goes all the way around the bar, briefly losing Gonzo as Gonzo awkwardly holds onto the support bar and tries to drag his feet over the edge. Gonzo tells Duke that Duke should probably drive on the way back as he falls over. Back in the hotel room, the story flashes back to the elevator where Gonzo confronts Lacerda over the attentions of a pretty blonde reporter (Cameron Diaz). Lacerda laughs when Duke tells a TV crew they work for Vincent Black Shadow. Gonzo scares Lacerda by pulling a knife on him. Duke leaves and broods over the meaning of his trip to Las Vegas, and some early morning gamblers who are "still chasing the American dream". Duke tries his luck at a quick round of roulette. When Duke returns, he finds that Gonzo, after consuming a full sheet of LSD, has trashed the room, and is sitting fully clothed in the bathtub, attempting to pull the tape player in with him, as he wants to hear the song better. He pleads with Duke to throw the machine into the water when the song "White Rabbit" peaks. Duke agrees but instead throws a grapefruit at Gonzo's head before running outside and locking Gonzo in the bathroom. Gonzo chases him out of the bathroom and tries to attack him with a knife, but Duke holds him back with the can of mace. Duke threatens to call the police, because he doesn't want Gonzo wandering around on acid and wanting to slice him up. Duke chases Gonzo back into the bathroom by yelling at him through a megaphone. He locks the door, jams it with a chair and goes to the couch, lighting a pipe. Duke attempts to type his reminiscences on hippie culture, and flashes back to San Francisco. A roadie (Lyle Lovett) offered Duke some LSD in a club called the Matrix. Duke took the product into the washroom and only consumed half of it, spilling the rest of it on a red woolen shirt. A bass player from the band walks into the bathroom and starts licking Duke's sleeve after he is told that it has LSD spilled on it. Back in the hotel room, Duke goes to the window, thinking about the end of the 60's acid wave and the crash that followed. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. But no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time in the world. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. We had all the momentum. We were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark, that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back The next morning, Duke awakes to a massive room service bill, and no sign of Gonzo, who had returned to Los Angeles while Duke slept. Duke takes off with his suitcase of drugs and doesn't pay the hotel a dime. At the reception, Duke is handed a telegram from Gonzo, which had come from Los Angeles. As he nears Baker, California, a highway patrolman H. Sulliven (Gary Busey) pulls him over for speeding and advises him to sleep at a nearby rest stop. Realizing that he is being set up, Duke instead decides to return to Las Vegas, and reads a telegram from Gonzo, informing him that he has a suite in his name at the Flamingo Las Vegas so he can cover a District Attorney's convention on narcotics. Duke fires off some shots randomly from the .357 into the desert. He decides he has no choice but the go to the conference. He rents a new Cadillac, with his credit card still technically valid. Duke checks into his suite, only to be met by an LSD-tripping Gonzo, and a young girl by the name of Lucy (Christina Ricci) he has brought with him. Gonzo explains that Lucy is a Christian artist and apparently a big fan of Barbara Streisand. She came all the way out from Montana to show her paintings to Barbara herself during a concert. An entire half of the room is filled with paintings of various sizes, every one of them of Barbara Streisand. Gonzo had fed her LSD on the plane without her knowing. Sensing the trouble this could get them into (as Lucy was a minor and any sex with her was illegal), Duke convinces Gonzo to ditch Lucy in another hotel before her drug wears off. Finally, they decide to pay a cab driver to drive her to the Tropicana, and they also pay for a room there, telling her she's going to meet Barbara Streisand, hoping she wouldn't remember what happened. Gonzo accompanies Duke to the D.A.'s convention, and the pair discreetly snort cocaine as the guest speaker delivers a comically out-of-touch speech about "marijuana addicts" before showing a brief film. Unable to take it, Duke and Gonzo flee back to their room, only to discover that Lucy has called. Their hallucinations mostly over, Gonzo deals with Lucy over the phone (pretending that he is being savagely beaten by thugs), as Duke attempts to mellow out by trying some of Gonzo's stash of Adrenochrome. However, the effects of the drugs spiral out of control, and Duke is reduced to an incoherent mess before he blacks out. After an unspecified amount of time, Duke wakes up to a complete ruin of the once pristine suite. After discovering his tape recorder, he attempts to remember what had happened. As he listens, he has brief memories of the general mayhem that had taken place including a heated encounter with a waitress at a diner, convincing a distraught cleaning woman that they are police officers investigating a drug ring, and attempting to buy an orangutan. Duke drops Gonzo off at the airport, after missing the entrance, driving across the tarmac and pulling up right next to the plane, before returning to the hotel one last time to finish his article. Duke speeds back to Los Angeles as The Rolling Stones' "Jumping Jack Flash" plays.

James Cole (Bruce Willis) is a convicted criminal living in a grim post-apocalyptic future. In 1996-97, the Earth's surface was contaminated by a virus so deadly that it forced the surviving population to live underground. In 2035, James Cole is a prisoner living in an underground compound beneath Philadelphia. Cole is sent to the surface periodically to collect biological samples to ascertain the condition of the planet. To earn a pardon, Cole allows scientists to send him on dangerous missions to the past to collect information on the virus, thought to be released by a terrorist organization known as the Army of the Twelve Monkeys. If possible, he is to obtain a pure sample of the original virus so a cure can be made. Cole is troubled with recurring dreams involving a chase and a shooting in an airport. On Cole's first trip, he arrives in Baltimore in 1990, not 1996 as planned. He is arrested for creating a public nuisance and doesn't have any ID on him. Cole is hospitalized in a mental institution on the diagnosis of Dr. Kathryn Railly (Madelline Stowe). Cole claims that he lives underground and says that he is supposed to be in 1996, which is the "past" for him. There, he encounters Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt), a fellow mental patient with fanatical animal rights and anti-consumerist leanings. Cole is interviewed by a panel of doctors and tries to explain that the virus outbreak has already happened and cannot be prevented. He says that the virus will be released by the Army of the 12 Monkeys in 1996, and by 1997 only 1% of the human population would survive. He says that he was sent to the wrong time and begs to make one telephone call to sort this all out. Cole tries unsuccessfully to leave a voicemail on a number monitored by the scientists in the future. But the number was not being monitored in 1990. After a failed escape attempt, Cole is restrained and locked in a cell, but then disappears, returning to the future. Back in his own time, Cole is interviewed by the scientists, who play a distorted voice mail message which gives the location of the Army of the Twelve Monkeys and states that they are responsible for the virus. Cole says that he did not leave the voicemail as he was in the wrong year. He is also shown photos of numerous people suspected of being involved with the virus, including Goines. The scientists offer Cole another chance to complete his mission and send him back in time. Cole briefly arrives at a battlefield during World War I, where he sees another prison inmate who was sent back in time, José. Cole is shot in the leg and gets transported to 1996. In 1996, Railly gives a lecture about the Cassandra complex (a psychological phenomenon that describes when someone's accurate predictions of a crisis are ignored or dismissed. The term comes from the Greek mythological figure Cassandra, who was given the gift of prophecy by Apollo but was cursed so that no one would believe her) to a group of scientists. At the post-lecture book-signing, Railly meets Dr. Peters, who tells her that apocalypse alarmists represent the sane vision while humanity's gradual destruction of the environment is the real lunacy. Cole arrives at the venue after seeing fliers publicizing it. Cole kidnaps Railly and sets out in search of Goines, learning that he is the founder of the Army of the Twelve Monkeys. When Cole confronts Goines, he denies any involvement with the group and says that in 1990, Cole originated the idea of wiping out humanity with a virus stolen from Goines' virologist father, Dr. Leland Goines. Cole is transported back to 2035, where he reaffirms to the scientists his commitment to his mission and asks to be sent back to complete it. After Cole disappears, Railly begins to doubt her diagnosis of Cole when she finds evidence that he is telling the truth, including a photograph from World War I in which Cole appears. Cole, on the other hand, convinces himself that his future experiences are hallucinations, and persuades the scientists to send him back again. Railly attempts to settle the question of Cole's sanity by leaving a voice mail on the number he provided, creating the message the scientists played prior to his second mission. They both now realize that the coming plague is real and make plans to enjoy the time they have left. They decide to depart for the Florida Keys before the start of the plague. Cole and Railly learn that the Army of the 12 Monkeys was not the source of the epidemic; the group's major act of protest is releasing animals from a zoo and placing Goines' father in an animal cage. At the airport, Cole leaves a last message telling the scientists they are on the wrong track following the Army of the Twelve Monkeys, and that he will not return. He is soon confronted by Jose (Jon Seda), an acquaintance from his own time, who gives Cole a handgun and instructions to complete his mission. Railly spots Dr. Peters (David Morse) at the airport and recognizes him from a newspaper as an assistant of Goines' father. Peters is about to embark on a tour of several cities that matches the viral outbreaks chronologically and geographically. Peters is about to embark on a tour of several cities around the world, which matches the sequence (memorized by Cole) of viral outbreaks. Cole, while fighting through security, is fatally shot as he tries to stop Peters. As Cole dies in Railly's arms, she makes eye contact with a small boy - the young James Cole witnessing his own death; the scene that will replay in his dreams for years to come. Peters, aboard the plane with the virus, sits down next to Jones (Carol Florence), one of the scientists from the future, who comments that her job is "insurance". The young Cole watches a plane take off from the ground outside the airport.

The story is set in a dystopian near-future of an indeterminate year of the 20st century in a nameless authoritarian European country during the Christmas season. Terrorist bombings are frequent and the government's war on these enemies of the state has lasted for a few decades. In a government office a man sitting in a room full of teletype machines swats a fly on the ceiling; the fly falls off the ceiling and into one of the teletypes, changing the name on one printout from "Tuttle" to "Buttle." At the Buttle home, the family is peacefully trimming their Christmas tree. Suddenly, armed policemen burst into the apartment upstairs and cut a large hole in the floor, dropping down into the Buttle's apartment. After his wife is forced to sign several forms, Buttle is arrested and taken away in a canvas bag. Meanwhile, Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce), a low-level government employee for the nation's Ministry of Information (MOI), often daydreams of himself as a winged warrior saving a beautiful maiden. One day he is assigned the task of trying to rectify the mishap of Buttle's arrest. His boss, Mr Kurtzmann (Ian Holm), is flustered by the appearance of a compensation check issued to Mrs Buttle for her husband. Sam is asked to transfer the funds directly to Mrs Buttle's bank account. The request is sent back because she doesn't have a bank account. Sam says he will drive out to her flat and deliver the check in person. When Sam visits Buttle's widow, he finds the woman in shock in her living room. He tries to give her the compensation check but she's too upset and hysterically asks where her husband is. He discovers Jill Layton (Kim Greist), the upstairs neighbor of the Buttles, is the same woman he dreams about. Jill is trying to help Mrs. Buttle find out what happened to her husband, but she has gotten tired of dealing with the bureaucratic paperwork and the run-around from various departments at MOI, while unbeknownst to her, she is now considered a terrorist friend of Harry Tuttle, a rogue air conditioning specialist who once worked for the government but left due to the amount of paperwork. When Sam tries to approach her, she is very cautious and avoids giving Sam full details, worried the government will track her down. Later that night, Sam comes in contact with the real Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro). Tuttle has intercepted Sam's call to deal with his malfunctioning climate control -- Tuttle's covert work is highly illegal and he's is intensely cautious when he enters Sam's flat, having been nearly trapped before. Tuttle jabbers about how he left government service and that the country has become "cordoned off" and offers to bypass a faulty component in Sam's nightmarish duct work. Sam helps Tuttle avoid detection when two Central Services workers, Spoor (Bob Hoskins) and Dowser (Derrick O'Connor) have shown up to deal with the air conditioning. When Sam tries to pay Tuttle, the repairman waves off the money saying that Sam had done him a favor by helping him hide from Spoor and Dowser . Tuttle exits flamboyantly, sliding down a nearby cable right after telling Sam "Remember Kid, we're all in this together!" Sam determines the only way to fully learn about Jill is to accept a promotion to "Information Retrieval" where he would have access to her classified records as she is considered a terrorist. He requests the help of his mother Ida (Katherine Helmond), vainly addicted to rejuvenating plastic surgery under the care of cosmetic surgeon Dr. Jaffe (Jim Broadbent), as she has connections to high ranking officers and is able to help her son get the position. His mother is delighted; she'd long since been frustrated at her son's lack of ambition, and the promotion Sam receives is one his mother has previously arranged for him but that Sam had declined. When Sam arrives at Information Retrieval, he is treated like a bureaucrat and given his own tiny office in their bleak and cavernous hallways. He soon discovers that he literally shares a desk with the agent next door, Harry Lime (Charles McKeown). Lime has a functioning computer and Sam eventually obtains Jill's records. He leaves to track her down before she gets in trouble. Before he goes to find her, he meets with an old friend of his, Jack Lint (Michael Palin) who, despite his pleasant personality, is actually an MOI agent who tortures and interrogates government prisoners. Jack warns Sam not to dig too deeply into the darker affairs of MOI because it can be a danger to Sam as well as Jill. When Sam finds Jill driving a large truck outside the entrance to MOI, he joins her, despite her obvious reluctance. He also notices that she picks up a mysterious package, which he believes is a bomb. While they're out shopping, a bomb goes off in the store and Sam immediately thinks Jill planted it. Sam returns to his flat to find Tuttle waiting outside. Spoor and Dowser are inside, wearing contamination suits amidst a tangle of hanging duct work. The two had retreated from Sam's apartment when Sam had asked them for the proper paperwork and have returned with the document, a 27B-6. They've also found the small device Tuttle had installed to bypass the duct work problem in the ventilation system. Sam walks out of the apartment and finds Tuttle, who switches the air couplings in Dower's and Spoor's suits for the apartment's sewage hose and gives Sam a periscope to watch them explode when their suits fill up. After Tuttle leaves, Sam sees Jill standing there. He takes Jill to his mother's home for safety and returns to his office, falsifying her records to make her appear deceased, allowing her to escape the bureaucracy. The two share a romantic night together before Sam is apprehended by the government at gun-point for misusing his position. After being read a long list of charges, Sam is now considered part of an assumed terrorist plot including Jill and Tuttle. Sam is taken to a cavernous smokestack and given to a government agent, dressed in a doctor's coat and a baby's mask, to be tortured. Terrified, Sam figures out that his torturer is Jack Lint and pleads with him. Jack is also very frightened at the though of having to torture his friend but as he begins, Tuttle and other members of the resistance shoot Jack dead and save Sam, blowing up the Ministry building as they flee in a hail of gunfire. As they try to disappear into the crowds, Tuttle's disappearance is more surreal and mysterious -- littered paperwork that had been lying in the streets suddenly adheres itself to his body. When Jack tries to help him, Tuttle's body has disappeared inside the paper. The scenes become more dream-like as Sam runs to his mother at a funeral. The funeral is described as that of Mrs. Terrain (Barbara Hicks), a friend of his mother's who over the course of the film has suffered increasing "complications" as she has submitted to the "acid treatment" of Dr. Chapman (Jack Purvis), a rival of Dr. Jaffe and whose technique Sam's mother does not hold in high regard. Sam's mother, thanks to Dr. Jaffe's repeated surgery, now seems as if she's in her 20s again, looking exactly like Jill, and is surrounded by a flock of juvenile admirers younger than Sam himself. She refuses to help and, falling into Mrs. Terrain's seemingly bottomless coffin, he then continues to run from the police in streets that more and more resemble the concrete and brick walls of his daydreams. When Sam finds himself surrounded on three sides by the police and the imaginary monsters of his nightmares, he turns to the only escape way left and climbs up a seemingly insurmountable pile of old flex-ducts such as those running the world of Brazil, and finds sanctuary in a trailer driven by Jill, whereupon the two leave the city together and settle in the countryside, free from their past lives. However, it is quickly revealed all of Sam's adventures since his arrest, including the happy ending, are all happening inside Sam's head. In front of the idyllic final scene, two faces come into view staring at the camera, that of Jack and of Mr. Helpmann (Peter Vaughan), a wheelchair-bound man who works as the Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Information, the system's highest official. The two men now realize that Sam has been reduced to a catatonic state at the hands of Jack and that he won't reveal any more to them. Jack gives up trying to torture Sam further and Sam is left still sitting in his chair with a smile on his face, quietly humming "Brazil" as Jack moves Mr. Helpmann in his wheelchair out of the room. (In an alternate version of the film, subtitled the "Love Conquers All" edition, Sam's dream ends with the idyllic life he's taken up with Jill in the small house in the countryside.)