Cause and Effect Thriller
What would happen if you went back in time and changed how an event turned out? What would be the consequences of these altered actions? That's the intriguing premise of the Ashton Kutcher vehicle The Butterfly Effect.
Kutcher plays Evan Treborn, a psychology student who has been plagued by stress-related blackouts his entire life, and with good cause. Treborn's early life was marred by a series of horrific events—child abuse, an incident of vandalism gone wrong and the violent death of a beloved pet. Moved to another town by his nurse mother, Andrea (Melora Walters), Treborn becomes a promising psych student until one day he finds the journals that he kept as a child and discovers that by reading them he can go back and "fix" the events that traumatized him, thus altering his and all his friends' futures.
What Treborn doesn't count on is the "butterfly effect" of the title, which, in chaos theory, holds that even the slightest change in events can have large consequences. Fueling Treborn's desire to change the past is his love for his childhood girlfriend Kayleigh (Amy Smart).
Written and directed by Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber (screenwriters of Final Destination 2), The Butterfly Effect is good at presenting the alternate realities that Treborn conjures out of his trips, inhabiting his 7-year-old and 15-year-old self with all the knowledge and experience of his adult psyche. But the tone of the movie is grim from the get-go. Treborn's early life is the stuff of nightmares as are the lives of friends Kayleigh, Lenny (Elden Henson) and Tommy (William Lee Scott), and it just gets grimmer as the movie goes on with each trip to the past resulting in a worse future for either Treborn or his pals.
Through this grimness, the movie has its values in the right place for a lot of its running time. Treborn is motivated by achieving values—a life with Kayleigh and a good life for his friends Lenny and Tommy. But the ending has him essentially sacrificing these values for the false alternative of preserving them by not getting them, which makes the grimness—including a prison sequence that makes The Shawshank Redemption look like an episode of Three's Company—of the preceding hour and forty-five minutes sort of pointless.
And that's the big problem with The Butterfly Effect. It understands that a life full of values is important, but also buys into the premise that there is something noble about sacrificing them. There's little said about the effect Treborn's final decision (of which he is fully aware) has on his life.
Best known for his goofball comedy roles in TV's That '70s Show and Dude, Where's My Car? among other, Kutcher shows that he also has the chops for drama. Smart, Henson and Scott stand-out the most, though, in part because they each essentially play three different roles.
In the end, The Butterfly Effect is an interesting, if flawed updating of the story of Job—though without the sunshine of the biblical account.
Kutcher plays Evan Treborn, a psychology student who has been plagued by stress-related blackouts his entire life, and with good cause. Treborn's early life was marred by a series of horrific events—child abuse, an incident of vandalism gone wrong and the violent death of a beloved pet. Moved to another town by his nurse mother, Andrea (Melora Walters), Treborn becomes a promising psych student until one day he finds the journals that he kept as a child and discovers that by reading them he can go back and "fix" the events that traumatized him, thus altering his and all his friends' futures.
What Treborn doesn't count on is the "butterfly effect" of the title, which, in chaos theory, holds that even the slightest change in events can have large consequences. Fueling Treborn's desire to change the past is his love for his childhood girlfriend Kayleigh (Amy Smart).
Written and directed by Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber (screenwriters of Final Destination 2), The Butterfly Effect is good at presenting the alternate realities that Treborn conjures out of his trips, inhabiting his 7-year-old and 15-year-old self with all the knowledge and experience of his adult psyche. But the tone of the movie is grim from the get-go. Treborn's early life is the stuff of nightmares as are the lives of friends Kayleigh, Lenny (Elden Henson) and Tommy (William Lee Scott), and it just gets grimmer as the movie goes on with each trip to the past resulting in a worse future for either Treborn or his pals.
Through this grimness, the movie has its values in the right place for a lot of its running time. Treborn is motivated by achieving values—a life with Kayleigh and a good life for his friends Lenny and Tommy. But the ending has him essentially sacrificing these values for the false alternative of preserving them by not getting them, which makes the grimness—including a prison sequence that makes The Shawshank Redemption look like an episode of Three's Company—of the preceding hour and forty-five minutes sort of pointless.
And that's the big problem with The Butterfly Effect. It understands that a life full of values is important, but also buys into the premise that there is something noble about sacrificing them. There's little said about the effect Treborn's final decision (of which he is fully aware) has on his life.
Best known for his goofball comedy roles in TV's That '70s Show and Dude, Where's My Car? among other, Kutcher shows that he also has the chops for drama. Smart, Henson and Scott stand-out the most, though, in part because they each essentially play three different roles.
In the end, The Butterfly Effect is an interesting, if flawed updating of the story of Job—though without the sunshine of the biblical account.
