The Butterfly Effect (2004)
Directed by Eric Bress
A young man struggles to access sublimated childhood memories. He finds a technique that allows him to travel back into the past, to occupy his childhood body and change history. However, he soon finds that every change he makes has unexpected consequences.
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16 films that influenced The Butterfly Effect
What critics say influenced The Butterfly Effect
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).
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."
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.”
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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.
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.
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The trick is making it past the "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure" phase of your career to "My Own Private Idaho" and (score!) "The Matrix."
Okay, from It's a Wonderful Life to Sliding Doors, movies have engaged in this hypothetical game before.