WARNING: As it is quite impossible to properly critique this film without discussing the ending, this review will contain spoilers.

Although The Butterfly Effect is a conversationally stimulating film to see with your friends, it does indulge in a repetitive trend seen in American TV and cinema – the obsession with “Be careful what you wish for.” The amount of material being released warning the American viewer against the dangers of everything from cloning, in The Sixth Day, to artificial intelligence, in The Terminator series is getting ridiculous. In The Butterfly Effect, the motif is the familiar time-travel disaster, but given a new, purely non-technological twist. The underlying message of all these films seems to be, “We shouldn’t do anything, if given the chance.” This is certainly one of many depressing morals in The Butterfly Effect.

Do not get me wrong, I think the possible profound scientific discoveries of the future, such as the cloning of people, true A.I., and time travel, should be treated cautiously lest we create our own doomsday, but The Butterfly Effect prods the possibility of time travel on a purely personal scale. Time-travelling does not lead to the imminent catastrophe of mankind, but the catastrophe of one man, Evan Treborn (Ashton Kutcher). The premise of time-travel in this movie is based on a mental affliction that causes the young Evan (played by Logan Lerman and John Patrick Amedori) to blackout whenever a traumatic event is about to happen. As it turns out, the blackouts serve as gateways for the adult Evan to time-travel to whenever he reads a journal he kept as a kid to help with his blackouts.

Apparently, it took not one, but two geniuses, Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, to come up with an idea so ludicrous, and they only aggravate their work of implausibility by attempting to show the consequences of this form of psychological time-travel. As the name suggests, The Butterfly Effect is made to be germane to the concept of chaos theory, which is pointless to explain in layman’s terms because Hollywood has already done such an awful job. Every time Evan goes back to alter the traumatic history of him and his friends, particularly that of his boyhood crush, Kayleigh (Amy Smart, as adult, Irene Gorovaia and Sarah Widdows, as kid), his alterations snowball to unpredictably horrific consequences in his current adult present.

The truth that discredits the drama of this entire movie is that Evan has relatively easy access to the past, and it’s hard not to see time-travelling as a grisly, but nonetheless amusing, game in this light. Literally, Evan reads his way out of a prison, and even reads back his amputated arms. The possibilities are endless for Evan, but he manages to fuck up worse every time he time travels. Despite this, Evan is like a god who can whimsically change the sequence of events pertaining to his life from certain key points in the past, albeit he can’t control those changes. Such a godly character fits your typical Hollywood, Frankenstenien stock villain, so Evan is given a tumultuous childhood to sort of morally permit him to play God. More than anything else, Evan goes back to give a better life to the Kayleigh, the woman he loves, who was abused as a child by her father. And, I suppose, in Hollywood, time-travelling for someone is as romantic as it gets.

But the romance of The Butterfly Effect is completely shadowed by its grotesqueness, and the disturbing pasts of Evan and his friends are shadowed by the disturbing futures Evan moulds. Only, the moulding does not correctly represent chaos theory and is used only for shoddy cinematic effects. If you go back in time with a gun and cap a few cavemen, the changes you cause would amplify themselves to create a completely different present – you could’ve unwittingly toppled McDonald’s, or killed Oprah, or made sideburns still chic. In fact, if you go back far enough, doing anything, including simply being there as a stimulus for ancient life, can and probably will have dramatic consequences in the future. Evan goes back in time and things seem to change, or not change, at the convenience of easily comprehensible, and filmable, scenes. In one example, Evan goes back in time to prove that Jesus talks to him in his sleep to his God-fearing cellmate so his cellmate will help him get out of prison. Evan travels to a time when he’s seven and drawing a picture in class and then quickly proceeds to put a hole in each of his hands. He then finds himself back in prison, under the same circumstances, except with scars on both his hands, and the undivided attention of one believer. He gets out prison by going back to a different point in his childhood, and altering that, for some reason, completely changes things, while mutilating your hands in front of your teacher and toddler classmates somehow does not.

Obviously, time-travelling movies are prone to inconsistencies, which is why I’m readily impressed by efforts such as 12 Monkeys and The Terminator series, which deal with time-travel in the only comprehensible way: you can travel back in time, but you can’t change the future. When a filmmaker decides that you can alter the future, he inevitably introduces illogicalities, and when two filmmakers decide you can alter the future with the ease that Evan can, they inevitably make for a disastrous time-travel movie that more uses the concept of time-travel to explore brainless, and nonsensical cause-and-effect relationships than to illustrate chaos theory.

But the most depressing part about The Butterfly Effect, aside from the writing, the direction, and the casting, is the message it ultimately provides. Countless times Evan opens up his journal to go back to try and save the relationship between him and Kayleigh and countless times he fails. Finally, after being denied his journals and finding himself in the worst possible situation, he discovers he can also time-travel by watching a film instead of reading. He watches a film of when he first meets Kayleigh and instead of being friendly to her like he once did, he introduces himself to her by telling her to fuck off. And, just like that, all of Evan’s time-travelling adventures pay off, and Evan decides that the gift of going back in time, whenever you please, is best left alone.

Thus, I’ve learned nothing about chaos theory from this film, but I have learned a few things about life in general. The first is that watching a film is better than reading; but this film teaches that when in doubt, do nothing, and when in love, tell her to fuck off. So, we’ve arrived at a paradox – see, I told you The Butterfly Effect is conversationally stimulating.


Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: VHS
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age