While Snowman, as many people have pointed out, has a very grim life ahead of him, I found James Cole's life in 12 Monkeys considerably more disturbing. He experiences just about everything that could go wrong in a dystopian future: his life is manipulated by far more powerful people, he loses his grip on what is real and believes himself to be insane, and ultimately becomes a witness to his own death. As with many time-travelers, he is ultimately helpless in the past even though he has such extensive knowledge of it; Cole's story employs the Cassandra myth to find tragedy.

The final tragedy of the film occurs when Cole realizes that his recurring dream is linked to his childhood, and that as a child he witnessed his own death at the airport. Here, even his personal memory of the past has failed him, and his life takes on a sort-of ouroboros configuration, where his final moments are taken in by his childhood-self, who will then go on to perform exactly the same actions decades later that will place him in the airport again. As finales go in time-travel movies, I think this is one of the most effective and disturbing tragedies possible; while time-travel movies may end up with the hero having to sacrifice himself to maintain the timeline (e.g. Donnie Darko, Terminator 2), here the character condemns his life to an endless cycle of helplessness and tragedy. We naturally think of time as linear, which is what makes time-travel movies such fun escapism; when the hero dies at the end, in some ways this returns us to a linear conception of their timeline, with a definite beginning and end. Here, Cole does not leave us with this satisfaction, and the murkiness of his timeline (and sanity and top of that) is unsettling, effective, and a unique comment on time-travel's complex effect on the lives of its users.