The Butterfly Effect

You don't have to be a philosopher to be able to appreciate one of the most well-known sentiments of Chaos Theory: the effects of a single butterfly flapping its wings could very well end up causing a hurricane on the other side of the world. In other words, every little action, no matter how insignificant it may seem, could have far-reaching consequences.

That's the basic premise at work in the 2004 film The Butterfly Effect starring Ashton Kutcher. Kutcher, perhaps best known for his work on the television sitcom That '70s Show as well as MTV's Punk'd, plays 20-year-old psychology student Evan Treborn. Treborn is working on a paper that explores the way in which the human mind stores memories.

This subject is particularly close to his heart because Evan has suffered from blackouts ever since he was a small child. These blackouts tended to occur during extremely traumatic events. Evan's mother took him to an institution to be evaluated, and the doctors there recommended that the boy start keeping journals in order to preserve his memories. The journals will become crucial to the rest of the story.

The film opens with an apparently institutionalized Evan breaking into an office while security guards frantically chase after him. He has time to duck down behind a desk and scribble out a note before the viewer is hit with the first of many flashbacks. We go back to Evan's childhood and meet a few of his friends who happen to be the other main players in the movie: siblings Tommy and Kayleigh, and another boy named Lenny.

During these flashbacks, we get an idea of just how traumatic Evan's childhood was. For example, Evan's institutionalized father tried to attack him in the visiting cell and was bludgeoned to death right in front of Evan's eyes; Tommy and Kayleigh's father abused them physically and exploited them sexually; and the four friends were involved in a prank that ended up having devastating consequences for Lenny. The result of all of these events combined to make for a largely screwed up group of young adults. Tommy turned into a violent thug; Lenny seemed trapped in his childhood shell and was still putting together plastic models in his bedroom at the age of 20; and Kayleigh allowed herself to be objectified by men. Only Evan turned out to be "normal" and well-adjusted, thanks to his mother deciding to move away from the old neighborhood when Evan was 13.

Evan's life hits a snag when he goes back to visit Kayleigh. He wants to talk to her about their childhood in order to fill in the blanks that his blackouts left him with. As it turns out, Kayleigh was mentally unstable, and her talk with Evan seemed to push her over the edge. She ends up doing something terrible to herself, leaving Evan wracked with guilt. He wishes he could take back what he said to her so that all the events that followed their talk could be avoided.
This is where the movie got a little fuzzy for me. It turns out that Evan somehow had the power to travel back in time, though I'm not quite sure if this was ever explained by the script. Although I was watching pretty carefully, I didn't notice how Evan figured out that he had this power to begin with. At any rate, he discovers that when he reads his childhood journals and really concentrates on the event described on the pages, he can transport himself (with his 20-year-old knowledge intact) back to the time in question. The rest of the movie then deals with Evan jumping back to various points in his childhood to change a major event. Then he snaps back to the "new" present to see what kind of long-term ripple effects result from that one major change. He keeps doing this in hopes of finding a way to make Kayleigh's life turn out to be a happy one. I'm not going to tell you if he succeeds or not!

Overall, I thought this was a very good movie. I was surprised that I'd never really heard of it before until I saw some of the reviews given by big-name critics. It seems that nearly everyone hated this movie! Sure, there are problems with the time travel logic if you really stop to think about it. But if you suspend your disbelief for the sake of the movie and just accept it as a fact in the filmmakers' universe, then I think the end product was actually very good.

I was surprised at how much I liked Kutcher in the lead role here. I had only seen him on Punk'd before, and he always came off as somewhat screechy and annoying in his role as the host of that show. But in The Butterfly Effect, he shows that he knows how to act and can carry a movie pretty much on his own. I'm not saying that the performance was Oscar-worthy or anything like that; but it was fairly convincing.

I really liked the whole idea that drove the plot as well. It's very interesting to think about how so many different events have caused our lives to take a particular path and to get us to the exact point that we're at now. When you think about it, a seemingly minor change can indeed alter the course of your life dramatically. What if your parents had never met? What if your family had moved when you were younger? What if you had different friends in high school? What if you went to a different college? What if you didn't get a job right out of school but instead traveled in Europe for a few months? All of these things can have a profound effect on your life, and that's the point that The Butterfly Effect tries to drive home. In addition, we see that other people's actions can have just as much of an effect on our lives as our own, which is another major point of the movie.

If there was one thing I didn't like about The Butterfly Effect it's that the film seemed to drag on forever. Even though I was interested in what was happening up on the screen, it still felt like the whole story was unfolding too slowly.

However, that one negative point doesn't prevent me from recommending The Butterfly Effect as a movie that is worth watching. It is a film that will make you think not only about the things happening in the characters' lives, but about what's going on in your own life as well.