The Butterfly Effect

the one line review:

vanilla sky meets memento

the overview

How do I always end up with these total whack job films? Seriously, all the twitchy time jumping reverse order flashback "wtf is going on" films.

Anyway, here's another. And in this genre, I've seen better.

the plot:

The film starts with a scene of Evan (Kutcher) being pursued by some unidentified people, hiding under a desk, writing a note about "being able to save her" and then jumps to 13 years previous. We see him as a kid where he suffers from serious blackouts and has no idea what happened in big chunks of time. A series of particularly unsavoury events occur, but we're not told what they are (because they happen during a blackout), we just know they happened during the aftermath.

Time skips forward a further 6 years, and cue more of the same.

Time skips forward to the present day and we have Evan back as the 20 something student who's become able to control his blackouts by reading up on the brain and mind and memory and so on. Model student, doing well, hurrah for him.

Until one day he reads a journal he kept when he was younger, and he finds himself transported back through time to that period, where he's able to influence what happens. He changes history at which point we're taken back to the "now" where things are totally different - his memories have changed, his situation is totally different. He then spends the rest of the film trying to recover these repressed memories, and visiting the people he knew as kids, including girlfriend Kayleigh (Smart).

And that's the basic premise. Through reading his old journals, he's able to take himself back through time and make changes to his past, and then live the results in the now.

the verdict:

It's a pretty good plot, and the film itself is certainly gripping. The whole thing is centred around Chaos Theory, and applied to the Butterfly Effect - that is - two nearly identical systems in time can have very different outcomes - i.e. go back in time and change one small thing, and a lot changes. A bit like in Back to the Future Part 2.

After watching the interviews with the Directors, it was certainly their intention to shock the audience, presenting some pretty nasty storylines and some very graphic scenes of violence. Certainly on a number of occasions, I was thinking to myself "Oh my God, that's sick" and this film is definitely quite twisted. It's a bit like Kill Bill in some respects in that it is pointedly graphic and gruesome. You're unlikely to have seen scenes of this nature in many films before.

The first hour or so, you're spent wondering what the hell is going on, and the suddenly it's all clear. The various connotations of the different "nows" are quite predictable, and the ultimate ending is pretty predictable, as you watch Evan steadily run out of chances to put everything right as the availability of his journals decreases.

Aside from the obvious difficulties surround time-travelling films in general, the film leaves quite a number of unanswered questions (such as how he managed to cure himself of the brain disease which caused the blackouts in the first place) which other films in this genre don't do. Sure, you can often leave films like this, having absolutely no clue what happened, or indeed, millions of different possibilities about WTF it was all about. With this there isn't that opportunity.

All in all, it's very watchable, and it does keep you interested right to the end. But there was something about it that didn't quite work for me, and it's hard to explain what, but that's why it only scores a 3. If you're up for more of the same, films like Vanilla Sky and Mulholland Drive do a better job.

NOTE: there are different versions of this film floating about with different endings (which aren't completely available in the DVD extras). Both ultimately have the same outcome, but the ending in the version I watched (the Director's cut I suppose, not the cinema/theatrical ending) was a bit shit.

The Butterfly Effect

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