"12 Monkeys": An Excuse to Display Bruce Willis Naked

We're spending our social isolation watching one post-Apocalyptic movie per day, and last night we got around to 12 Monkeys (1995), directed by former Monty Python trooper Terry Gilliam.  I've watched the entire movie, and read a synopsis on wikipedia, as well as two or three reviews.

And I still have no idea what's going on.

I know that there's a stereotypic post-Apocalyptic dystopia, with weird Big Brothers in lab coats and dark glasses pushing weird wires and tubes into Bruce Willis.

They apparently send him back in time about 30 years, to 1996, to stop a bad guy from releasing a virus that kills 5 billion people and wraps the world in perpetual winter.  Except they send him to 1990 instead, where he stupidly tells everyone that he's from the future, whereupon he is admitted to a creepy mental hospital straight out of One Flew Over a Cuckoo's Nest.  Somehow he makes it to 1996, but now he thinks that he's just imagining the future world.

He also ends up in World War I, where his coworker Jose (John Seda, top photo) is stupidly telling everyone that he's from the future.  Jose may appear in other time frames, too.

And in his childhood, where he saw a murder in an airport, which is somehow important.  But it's all jumbled and non-sequential.

In one of the time frames, he kidnaps a psychiatrist.named Kathryn to try to...I don't know what.  But in another, she's an ally who tries to convince him that the future pandemic is real.

Bruce also kidnaps some animal rights activists, including Felix Pire (left).  I don't know why.

Brad Pitt appears in the mental hospital as the one who always says "we're not crazy, society is crazy." He also appears in other time frames, I think.

Meanwhile in the background we see a Woody Woodpecker cartoon about time travel,the Marx Brothers movie Monkey Business, and the Jimmy Stewart movie Vertigo.

I don't get it.

But there are three elements of gay interest:

1. Bruce Willis is naked a lot.  Of course, he's usually having weird tubes pushed into him or being covered with white goop, but still, there are frequent butt, chest, and crotch shots.  He runs down the street naked a lot, even though his fellow time-traveler has no trouble keeping his clothes on.  Is this movie just a ploy to display Bruce's body?

2. He doesn't display any heterosexual interest. I expected him and the psychiatrist he kidnaps to fall in love, but they don't.  In one scene, the dystopian scientists sing "I Found My Thrill on Blueberry Hill," and promise that he will soon be released (was he a prisoner of some sort?) and thus able to get women.  He yells "I don't want women!  I want to get well!"

No one else displays any heterosexual interest either, that I remember.

3.Brad Pitt has a hidden motive for helping Bruce. It might be explained at some point,but it looks a lot like romantic interest. At least in one of the time frames.