Eric Bress
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Filmography
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Connections, in both directions
Happy Death Day 2U (2019)
Directed by Christopher Landon
influenced by The Butterfly Effect (2004)
Plot
Landon has a lot of chance to completely repeat a lot of what “Happy Death Day” covered, but the sequel thankfully drops the “Groundhog’s Day” scenario in favor of something in line with “The Butterfly Effect.”
If 2017’s surprise time-loop slasher Happy Death Day was rightfully called a mash-up of Groundhog Day and Scream, then its follow-up, Happy Death Day 2U can be called a strange combination of Weird Science, The Butterfly Effect , and any episode of Scooby-Doo .
The movie’s concept is part “Groundhog Day” with a shaker of “The Butterfly Effect,” as Tree Gelbman (Jessica Rothe), as she did in the original, relives the same day over and over, trying to keep from being murdered.
But the filmmakers wanted to capitalize on something cool like chaos theory, like Michael Crichton did successfully in “Jurassic Park,” but they didn’t want to actually make it accurate.
Although The Butterfly Effect takes its name from the old adage used to explain chaos theory to high school kids, this is a film that manages to say less about chaos theory than Jurassic Park did.
The Butterfly Effect takes its name from a premise of chaos theory: a butterfly flapping its wings in North Africa can cause a typhoon half-a-world away (see Jurassic Park for a similar explanation).
What happens and why involves some low-grade special effects and a time-traveling conundrum that's been in circulation at least since Ray Bradbury's 1952 story "A Sound of Thunder," in which a man steps on a butterfly in the past and changes the future.
The Butterfly Effect owes a great debt, then, to Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder," Brian Aldiss' "Poor Little Warrior," William Goldman's Control, and Clive Barker's "The Inhuman Condition"; that it manages to honour to some degree each one of its sources (if only with the precision lavished on the telling of its dank tale) identifies the picture as a most difficult beast to embrace--and just as difficult to dislike.
…but they should really be nodding in the direction of Ray Bradbury and his short story "A Sound of Thunder."
Actually, the movie has little to do with chaos theory; a closer allusion is to the Ray Bradbury story “A Sound of Thunder.”
The story that unfolds as a result could have become cerebral junk-food, like last year's logic-deficient time-travel/alternative-reality B-movie "The Butterfly Effect."
A shot of power lines suggests the interconnectedness of the past, present, and future, yet The Jacket's fascination with such temporal associations is superficial—unlike even Ashton Kutcher's incompetent The Butterfly Effect , Maybury's film spends little thought on the time-space ramifications of its decade-hopping story.
While not as far out on the limb of paradoxes as films like Jacob's Ladder and The Butterfly Effect, The Jacket nevertheless has the capacity to provoke thought and consternation.
What keeps The Jacket from descending fully into the truly absurd depths of last years The Butterfly Effect are the unwavering performances of its leads.
"The Jacket" is patched together with pieces of "The Butterfly Effect," "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "Altered States" and "The Crow," among others, but some of its own conceits do not work particularly well.
Unlike "Frequency," however, "The Butterfly Effect" has too darn many changes, so many that one thinks regularly of the great line by the Austrian emperor in Milos Forman's 1984 masterpiece, "Amadeus," "Too many notes."
Barry and Bruce discuss the concept of “The Butterfly Effect” – that every minor change to a timeline could kick off an unpredictable chain reaction leading to catastrophe.
Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
Directed by Daniel Scheinert
influenced by The Butterfly Effect (2004)
Themes
The Butterfly Effect (2004) and various Spider-Man movies (Into the Spider-Verse and No Way Home) have confronted the multiverse theory on a relatively minor scale, tossing a handful of universes together or considering a few distinct branches.
“Lucy” wants to be a thinking man’s action movie with strains of “The Tree of Life,” but it’s really a by-the-numbers revenge movie for people who thought Ashton Kutcher's “The Butterfly Effect” was profound.
There's a little Sliding Doors in this film, although, unlike the earlier movie, The Butterfly Effect is not a romantic comedy, nor does it show us the parallel evolution of different universes.
Okay, from It's a Wonderful Life to Sliding Doors, movies have engaged in this hypothetical game before.
Lucky for him, though, that he finds a way like the Jim Caviezel character in Gregory Hoblit's superb, underappreciated drama, "Frequency," a young man able to communicate with his dead father via a Twilight Zone-like ham radio, advising him how to avoid turning the wrong way while putting a fire.
A threat to serious psychoanalytic study, The Butterfly Effect is time travel for the MTV generation: After a series of traumas leaves a small group of friends tainted for life, Evan Treborn (Ashton Kutcher) plays God by whipping out his journals and reading aloud, whereupon the film's aesthetic buckles under pressure and allows New Line Cinema to cross-pollinate several titles in its catalog (e.g., Final Destination, Frequency, Seven).
This isn’t the first recent reinvention of the time-travel tale; that honor belongs to “Frequency.”
For a far more daring and novel approach to a similar concept, rent 2001's eerie, oddball underground hit "Donnie Darko."
Unfortunately, his efforts are about on par with those of Dudley Moore in trying to outwit Peter Cook's Lucifer over the seven wishes in Bedazzled.
This has the makings of great black comedy -- something along the lines of the old Peter Cook/Dudley Moore classic "Bedazzled" -- but if the laughs in "The Butterfly Effect" are many, they're also unintentional.
If Bill Murray had to revisit a single day in the great comedy "Groundhog Day," improving his fortune month by month via the lessons he learns, then Ashton Kutcher, as Evan, seems unable to make the right changes.
Where many time-travel movies such as The Butterfly Effect employ an act-first-reflect-later style of plot, I’ll Follow You Down spends most of its time dealing with the ethics, morality and consequences behind the concept of altering time.
Like 2004’s The Butterfly Effect, about a man (played by Ashton Kutcher) who whizzes around alternate universes whenever he opens his diary and subsequently creates a horrible mess to deal with, the excitement in Predestination often arises from direct exchanges between characters whose relationships are complicated by the time travel traffic around them.
Laura’s tampering with past events could have gotten all dark like The Butterfly Effect .
Choices she makes and things she shares with Harrison have a ripple effect into a new present timeline, changing not just Harrison, but aspects of Laura’s life and those around her. Press Play becomes a sort of rom-com riff on The Butterfly Effect , and I was completely invested in Laura and Harrison’s relationship.
And there are echoes of The Butterfly Effect without the overt darkness.
In a sneaky way, though, now and again I got the distinct feeling of watching a genre passion play based on the revelations of Steve James' amazing documentary Stevie : the idea that the best intentions of the privileged class are not only fraught with self-interest and venality, but doomed to abject failure besides.
Ditch The Butterfly Effect notion, Don’t Let Go is more set on giving Uncle Jack the chance to redeem himself and potentially save his niece with very few restrictions.
“Don’t Let Go” is definitely not going to bump “Looper” or (the underrated) “The Butterfly Effect” out of the Top 10, but when it comes to time-travel plots, it’s more surprising and solidly thought through than 90% of sci-fi movies.
After discovering he has the power “do it over” he, like Ashton Kutcher in The Butterfly Effect, finds he can change his circumstances — just get him to somewhere he can shoot off a load.