The Butterfly Effect 3 Revelations

[Filomeno Robles]

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Temporal Anomalies in Time Travel MoviesunravelsThe Butterfly Effect 3: Revelations

Not long after analyzing The Butterfly Effect, I became aware that there was a sequel entitled The Butterfly Effect 3--because I saw it listed as airing on late night cable, and recorded it. However, since this was not on the order of a Naked Gun movie, the fact that there was a third suggested that there must have been a second, so I did not watch the third lest it rely on the second. Finally, as I was looking for a different movie which seemed to have vanished from shelves at the local retailer, I stumbled on a copy of The Butterfly Effect 2, packaged in a collection set with this one, so desperate for a time travel movie to analyze for this series I bought it.

Having found serious problems with Butterfly Effect that were compounded and expanded in Butterfly Effect 2, we held little hope for this installment, and thus were not disappointed. This is the way it goes down--and down it goes, as a time travel film, joining its predecessors in the list of movies that failed to understand and follow even their own rules.

Butterfly Effect was a convoluted time travel movie in which the hero, Evan Treborn, managed to ruin his own life and the lives of others around him by trying to fix things in the past. It was laced with impossibilities, inconsistent with its own rules, and generally the kind of film that time travel fans love because they believe they can solve it, and keep working at it, despite the fact that it is insoluble. Thus a sequel was made, Butterfly Effect 2, in which a new hero, completely unrelated to the original one, Nick Larson, discovers a similar ability, and so attempts to fix things in his own life, again with disastrous effects. That one managed to find impossibilities that the original missed, as well as repeating several of the problems of its predecessor. So they made a third, Butterfly Effect 3: Revelations, and the question is whether it is as disastrous, temporally, as its predecessors.

This time the time traveler is Sam Reid, who with the advice of a physics professor named Harry Goldburg has adopted two important rules--one that he never changes his own past, and the other that he always has someone supervising his body when he jumps. This is usually his little sister Jenna, who adores him. Together they use his gift to solve unsolved murders, pretending he is a psychic. He leaps back to the times and places of the murders and watches carefully, memorizing the details, so he can find the face in the mug shots and tell the police exactly what happened. As the film opens he has led them to twenty-two killers, and is identifying his twenty-third. We also know that prior to this he made a trip to the past to save Jenna from a fire--the main reason for his adherence to those rules, as his parents died in that fire instead, but he was fifteen at the time and had suffered through Jenna's funeral. That implies that he already knew he could travel to moments in the past, and therefore that he had already done so. We thus have at least twenty-four trips to the past prior to the opening of the movie, only one of which (the fire) we know in any detail.

As with the other films, the time traveler occupies his own younger body for the duration of his visit. He did not suffer the blackouts of the first film, but we noted there that these were probably a separate symptom of the problem, and noted in the second film that Nick did not have these. Sam, though, does not use photographs or movies or journals, but instead obtains the date, time, and place he is targeting and focuses on these as he loses touch with his present body. That body is in a tub filled with ice water, apparently to prevent him from overheating, and when Jenna is monitoring him he is attached to a couple of leads on his forehead and chest, suggesting that brain and cardiac activity are being monitored.

Things start going wrong, though, when he breaks his rule. A girl he knew in high school comes to see him, Elizabeth Brown, sister to his high school sweetheart Rebecca Brown who was murdered in her bedroom. Lonnie Flennons, whom Rebecca was secretly seeing on the side, has been convicted of the crime, and now a decade later he is about to be executed for it--but Elizabeth has discovered in Rebecca's diaries enough to cause her to believe someone else killed her sister, and she wants the real killer identified before the wrong person is executed. She offers to hire him.

He quite reasonably but without explanation declines, but it eats at him, and so he changes his mind, deciding that it would not be unreasonable for him to travel to the past and do what he does, watching for the killer so he can identify him. Unfortunately it does not work.

Little more can be said without spoilers, and it will be difficult to follow the series without having seen the film, so now would be the time to stop reading and watch it if you intend to do so. The film is marketed as a horror movie, and there are some gory scenes of murders and murder victims along with a couple of gratuitous sex scenes, so it is not for everyone. It is, however, interesting and convoluted, and a lot of that is going to be unraveled quickly with major spoilers in the next paragraph.

The problems Sam encounters when he attempts to discover Rebecca's killer arise because the killer is also a time traveler, and one with intimate knowledge of Sam's intentions: his sister Jenna. This also complicates our analysis, because we do not know when Jenna makes her trips, or what trips she has made.

We can, though, conclude that she was very young when she made the first one. She is a few years younger than Sam, and most probably made a short trip to the past to kill Rebecca. To reach that conclusion you have to understand Jenna, though, and that involves the fire.

In the original history, Jenna died in the fire, but Sam and his parents escaped the burning house. Sam cannot live with that outcome, so sometime shortly after the funeral he travels to the date of the fire, gets a ladder ready, and when the house is burning he climbs to the second floor window and rescues his sister, carrying her down the ladder. He having saved her life, she is completely devoted to him.

We could say that no girl was good enough for Sam except Jenna, in Jenna's opinion; and she wanted her brother to be solely hers. But what mattered with Rebecca wasn't that she was taking Sam away from her, but that she was cheating on him. Eventually Rebecca must have told Sam, breaking his perhaps eighteen year old heart (Elizabeth is the younger sister, and is driving at the time of the murder, but they are all in high school). Jenna kills Rebecca before this revelation, but would not have done so too long after the fact--people recover from high school breakups, and it is evident that Sam and Rebecca did not stay together (when Sam has undone all the deaths, he is married not to Rebecca, who is present at the party, but to Elizabeth). The infidelitous Rebecca must die, in Jenna's view, for the hurt she caused her beautiful Sam. So she makes a brief hop to the past, kills Rebecca in her own bed, setting it up for a time when she knew Lonnie was coming over and then framing him for the murder.

This is exactly the sort of paradox that makes the Butterfly Effect franchise so difficult, as the rules keep shifting and the viewer is never told how. Both the fire and the murder give us anomalies that result in impossibilities, effectively grandfather paradoxes on a smaller scale, in which what the time traveler does prevents what the time traveler does.

Sam goes back to rescue Jenna from the fire because Jenna died in the fire. Under fixed time theory this is not possible; there are several other reasons why fixed time would not work for this film, but this is sufficient to eliminate a fixed time explanation. Under replacement theory we have an infinity loop: Sam knows that Jenna died in the fire, so he makes a trip to the past and saves her from the fire, but now he does not know that she died in the fire so he does not make the trip (or travels to the past to save his parents instead), so she dies, and he makes the trip to save her, each history causing the other.

We now face the problem of the two Sams. Even were we to suppose that it was only a week between the fire and the funeral, that's a week in which someone is living Sam Reid's life, building the memories of that first week after his parents died in the fire but somehow he saved his sister. Then suddenly Sam, having leapt in and taken over his body during the fire, does so again, and all memory of that week is lost to him. What happened to the Sam who lived through that week?

Ordinarily in such a case we would answer that there are now two Sams in this universe, the one who lived here all his life and the one who entered it from another universe and changed it. But Sam travels by leaping into his own body, and so there is only one Sam because there is only one body. What has become of the man who was Sam in this universe yesterday? Where are the memories of the life he lived?

Further, if we accept that Sam has left his old universe, what becomes of him in that other universe--or, in later instances, of Jenna, his sister, who has to report that her brother died in her bathtub, in a tub filled with ice water while attached to the leads of a cardiac and encephalic monitoring system? Either some version of Sam returns to his body, or his body is dead. If the version that changed history does so, then he is in a universe he tried and failed to alter and presumably not also in the altered universe. If the version of him he replaced does so, then he is disoriented, with no clear notion of how the world changed. He might even travel back to the past to see if he can understand it; he might want to take his old life back from the version of himself who stole it from him.

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