| The Butterfly Effect: Kelso vs. Time Travel |
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| I had assumed that the title of this movie came from
the Ray Bradbury story “A Sound of Thunder,” in which
a man goes back in time and steps on a butterfly, which alters the future. Instead, there’s a title card that says that something as small as the flutter of a butterfly’s wing can cause a typhoon halfway around the world. The quote is attributed to chaos theory. Can you attribute quotations to a theory? “God does not throw dice” - The Theory of Relativity. It doesn’t seem right. Ashton Kutcher plays Evan, a college student who discovers that he can travel back to certain moments in his childhood by reading his old journals. After a friend of his commits suicide, he goes back in time in an attempt to prevent it. Unfortunately, he only makes things worse and has to keep going back to fix the mistakes he’s made. Due to his meddling, people become prisoners, mental patients, cancer victims, crack whores, amputees, and worst of all, frat boys. The DVD comes with a director’s cut, which has a much grimmer ending than the theatrical version, which is relatively happy. Either way, the movie is depressing. This movie was better than I expected it to be. It garnered pretty bad reviews, many of which focus on Kutcher’s performance, which is so-so, not great and not awful. The film is full of plot holes, so if the title conned you into thinking that this was a serious, well thought out science fiction film, you will be disappointed. There are far too many inconsistencies to list, both in the film’s internal time travel logic and in its characters’ behavior. Personally, my biggest question was why Evan needs his journals to go back in time at all. It seems to me that simply concentrating on a particular memory would have the same effect. The Butterfly Effect was made by the guys who made Final Destination 2, and the two films are similar in that the idea is basically to string together a series of events in which each is more horrible than the last. The film wants its audience to ask, “How could this get any more fucked up?” So that it can show them. It’s filled with sordid subject matter like murder, child molestation, deadly acts of vandalism, and a scene in which a little boy tries to burn a dog alive. These things apparently bother some people. If you enjoy this kind of movie, or at least know what kind you’re watching, the Butterfly Effect is not a bad way to waste two hours. |
| Reviewed 30 July 2004 by BLT |
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