The Butterfly Effect Film Review

[Michael Rosiles]

Chaostheory teaches us that small events can have enormous consequences. An opening title informs us that butterfly flapping its wings in Asia could result in a hurricane halfway around the world. Yes, although given the number of butterflies and the determination with which they flap their little wings, isn't it extraordinary how rarely that happens? "The Butterfly Effect" applies this theory to the lives of four children whose early lives are marred by tragedy. When one of them finds that he can go back in time and make changes, he tries to improve the present by altering the past.

The characters as young adults are played by Ashton Kutcher, as Evan, a college psych major; Amy Smart and William Lee Scott as Kayleigh and Tommy, a brother and sister with a pedophile father; and Elden Henson as Lenny, their friend. The story opens in childhood, with little Evan seriously weird. His drawings at kindergarten are sick and twisted (and also, although nobody ever mentions it, improbably good for a child). He has blackouts, grabs kitchen knives, frightens his mother (Melora Walters), becomes a suitable case for treatment.

A shrink suggests that he keep a daily journal. This he does, although apparently neither the shrink nor the mother ever read it, or their attention might have been snagged by entries about how Mr. Miller (Eric Stoltz), father of Kayleigh and Tommy, forced them all to act in kiddie porn movies. Evan hangs onto the journals, and one day while reading an old one at school he's jerked back into the past and experiences a previously buried memory.

One thing he'd always done, after moving from the old neighborhood, was to promise Kayleigh "I'll come back for you." (This promise is made with handwriting as precocious as his drawing skills.) The flashbacks give him a chance to do that, and eventually he figures out that by reading a journal entry, he can return to that page in his life and relive it. The only problem is, he then returns to a present that is different than the one he departed from -- because his actions have changed everything that happened since.

This is a premise not unknown to science fiction, where one famous story has a time-traveler stepping on a cockroach millions of years ago and wiping out humanity. The remarkable thing about the changes in "The Butterfly Effect" is that they're so precisely aimed: They apparently affect only the characters in the movie. From one reality to the next, Kayleigh goes from sorority girl to hooker, Evan zaps from intellectual to frat boy to prisoner, and poor Lenny spends some time as Kayleigh's boyfriend and more time as a hopeless mental patient.

Do their lives have no effect on the wider world? Apparently not. External reality remains the same, apart from minute adjustments to college and prison enrollment statistics. But it's unfair to bring such logic to bear on the story, which doesn't want to really study the butterfly effect, but simply to exploit a device to jerk the characters through a series of startling life changes. Strange, that Evan can remember everything that happened in the alternate lifetimes, even though by the theory of the movie, once he changes something, it didn't happen.

Ashton Kutcher has become a target lately; the gossip press can't forgive him for dating Demi Moore, although that's a thing many sensible young men dream of doing. He was allegedly fired from a recent film after the director told him that he needed acting lessons. Can he act? He can certainly do everything that's required in "The Butterfly Effect." He plays a convincing kid in his early 20s, treating each new reality with a straightforward realism when most actors would be tempted to hyperventilate under the circumstances.

And there's a certain grim humor in the way the movie illustrates the truth that you can make plans, but you can't make results. Some of the futures Even returns to are so seriously wrong from his point of view that he's lucky he doesn't just disappear from the picture, having been killed at 15, say, because of his meddling.

I enjoyed "The Butterfly Effect," up to a point. That point was reached too long before the end of the movie. There's so much flashing forward and backward, so many spins of fate, so many chapters in the journals, that after awhile I felt that I, as well as time, was being jerked around.

Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, the co-writers and directors, also collaborated on "Final Destination 2" (2003), another film in which fate works in mysterious way, its ironies to reveal. I gave that half of a star, so "The Butterfly Effect" is five times better. And outside, the wind is rising ...

The Butterfly Effect is a 2004 American science fiction thriller film written and directed by Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber. It stars Ashton Kutcher, Amy Smart, Eric Stoltz, William Lee Scott, Elden Henson, Logan Lerman, Ethan Suplee, and Melora Walters. The title refers to the butterfly effect.

Kutcher plays 20-year-old college student Evan Treborn,[3] who experiences blackouts and memory loss throughout his childhood. Later, in his 20s, Evan finds he can travel back in time to inhabit his former self during those periods of blackout, with his adult mind inhabiting his younger body. He attempts to change the present by changing his past behaviors and set things right for himself and his friends, but there are unintended consequences for all. The film draws heavily on flashbacks of the characters' lives at ages 7 and 13 and presents several alternative present-day outcomes as Evan attempts to change the past, before settling on a final outcome.

The film had a poor critical reception;[4][5][6] however, it was a commercial success, generating box-office revenues of $96 million on a budget of $13 million. The film won the Pegasus Audience Award at the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival, and was nominated for Best Science Fiction Film at the Saturn Awards and Choice Movie: Thriller in the Teen Choice Awards, but lost to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, another film from New Line Cinema, respectively.

Growing up, Evan Treborn and his friends, Lenny Kagan and Kayleigh Miller, and Kayleigh's brother Tommy, suffered many severe psychological traumas that frequently caused Evan to experience amnesia. These traumas include being forced to take part in pornography by Kayleigh and Tommy's father, George Miller; being nearly strangled to death by his institutionalized father, Jason Treborn, who is then killed in front of him by guards; accidentally killing a mother and her infant daughter while playing with dynamite with his friends; and seeing his dog, Crockett, burned alive by Tommy. Evan keeps meticulous journals of his day to day life as a coping mechanism.

Some time later, while entertaining a girl in his college dorm room, Evan discovers that when he reads from his former journals, he can time travel and redo parts of his past. His time-traveling episodes account for the frequent blackouts he experienced, since those are the moments when his older self occupied his consciousness.

After a traumatized Kayleigh commits suicide, Evan travels back in time and warns George to never touch her. He comes back to a reality where he and Kayleigh are a happy couple in college. However, George took out his frustrations on Tommy, who grew up to be even more unhinged. Tommy eventually attacks Evan, who kills him in a fit of rage and is sent to prison. There, he manages to time travel once more after his mother brings him a journal during a visit.

Evan wakes up in a mental hospital and finds that, in this reality, the journals do not exist and his brain has suffered irreversible damage due to the rigors of time travel. At one point, Evan has a conversation with a doctor who reveals that his father had the same abilities before losing the photographs that allowed him to time jump, causing everyone to believe him to be crazy. Evan ultimately reaches the conclusion that he and his friends will never have good futures as long as he keeps altering the past.

After escaping the hospital staff and barricading himself in an office, Evan travels back one final time, via the use of an old home movie, to the day he first met Kayleigh. He intentionally upsets her so that she and Tommy will choose to live with their mother in a different neighborhood, instead of with their father when they divorce. As a result, they are not subjected to a destructive upbringing, do not grow up with Evan, Lenny is never bullied, and all go on to have happy, successful lives.

Evan awakens in a college dorm room, where Lenny is his roommate. As a test, he asks where Kayleigh is, to which Lenny responds "Who's Kayleigh?" Satisfied that his friends' futures are secure, Evan burns his journals and videos to avoid altering the timeline ever again.

With his brain terribly damaged and aware that he is committed to a psychiatric facility where he will lose access to his time travel ability, Evan makes a desperate attempt to change the timeline by watching a family video, which shows his mother just before she was about to give birth to Evan. Evan travels back to that moment and strangles himself in the womb with his umbilical cord so as to prevent the multi-generational curse from continuing, consistent with an added scene where a psychic palm reader tells Evan "you have no lifeline" and that he does "not belong to this world".

Kayleigh is then seen as a child in the new timeline having chosen to live with her mother instead of her father, and a montage suggests that the lives of the other childhood characters have become loving and less tragic.

Critical reception for The Butterfly Effect was generally poor.[4][5][6] On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a 33% approval rating based on 172 reviews; the rating average is 4.8/10. The site's consensus reads: "The premise is intriguing, but it's placed in the service of an overwrought and tasteless thriller."[4] On Metacritic, another review aggregator, it has a score of 30 out of 100 based on 35 reviews, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".[5] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.[7]

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