The Butterfly Effect (2004) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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Just remember things always get worse before they get even more screwed up.

The Butterfly Effect takes the premise of a popular chaos theory hypothesis and explores the ramifications of altering one’s own life. It creates a psychological thriller that puts its main character through a torturous, downward spiral, as he learns it’s better to leave some things alone.

First Impressions

From the trailer, this appears to be a time travel film where a man is able to travel back in time by reading some old journal entries. He decides to go back and save a woman that he loved, but each time he travels, he makes things worse, such as ending up in jail, or finding the woman he loved is a drug addict. After two weeks of limited time travel films, I hope The Butterfly Effect delivers.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

The film begins with Evan Treborn (Ashton Kutcher) locking himself in a doctor’s office and writing a note about trying to “save her.” Thirteen years earlier, 7 year old Evan (Logan Lerman) is troubled. His teacher shows mother Andrea (Melora Walters) a disturbing drawing, Evan is seen standing with a knife in his kitchen, he has a disturbing experience with a Mr. Miller (Eric Stoltz), and has recurring blackouts where he can’t remember anything. Evan’s doctor (Nathaniel DeVeaux) thinks that maybe visiting Evan’s father, Jason (Callum Keith Rennie), might help the boy connect. Jason is in a mental institute having had a severe psychotic break years earlier. Evan experiences a blackout and awakens to his father choking him. Jason dies when the guards forcibly remove him from Evan.

Six years later, Evan and his friends Lenny (Kevin G. Schmidt), Kayleigh Miller (Irene Gorovaia) and her brother Tommy (Jesse James) decide to use an explosive found at the Miller’s to blow up a mailbox. Evan has another blackout. He and Kayleigh grow closer, sharing a first kiss which is met with hostility by Tommy. One day Evan, Kayleigh, and Lenny find Tommy torturing a dog in a junkyard, when Evan again blacks out. He awakens to find a burned bag that had contained the dog and a sad Lenny. Andrea decides they need to move, and as the truck drives away, Evan see’s Kayleigh running towards the truck and holds up a note that says, “I’ll be back for you.”

Seven years later in college, Evan is a psych major living with his goth-punk roommate Thumper (Ethan Suplee). He discovers when he re-reads one of his journal entries he actually is able to inhabit his younger body for a few moments, living during the moments that were previously blacked out. Evan returns to the day of the mailbox explosion and witnesses a woman and her baby getting killed. Visiting a psychic with his mother, the woman tells him he was never meant to be. Mom admits that he’s a miracle baby, as she had multiple stillbirths before him. While back in town Evan finds Kayleigh (Amy Smart) and upsets her talking about what happened with her Dad that one day when they were seven. She kills herself the next day.

Saddened by Kayleigh’s death, and knowing he can do something about it, Evan travels back to the moment when Mr. Miller was making a “home movie” with young Kayleigh (Sarah Widdows) and Evan. Evan tells him to stop touching his daughter or he’ll kill him. When Evan reawakens, he’s with Kayleigh in college, and is now a frat brother. Tommy (William Lee Scott) gets out of prison and attacks Evan, but Evan kills him in self-defense and is sent to prison where he is abused by white supremacist inmates. With protection from his cellmate Carlos (Kevin Durand), Evan reads a piece of his journal and revisits the events at the junkyard so that Lenny kills Tommy. In the new timeline, Lenny (Elden Henson) is now an inmate at a psychiatric hospital.

Evan travels back to his 7-year-old self to ask Jason about how to fix things. His father screams that he must be the last one, and attacks Evan. Having changed things even more, Kayleigh is a drug addicted prostitute that doesn’t believe Evan when he tells her what’s been happening. He returns again to the mailbox explosion and runs to warn the lady, who is saved by Tommy. The explosive goes off and Evan finds he’s in a new timeline with no arms, where Lenny is his college roommate and also in a relationship with Kayleigh. Saddened, and without journal entries–due to not having hands–he tries to kill himself, but Tommy–now an evangelical–saves him.

Trying to find a way to remove the explosive from the timeline, Evan travels back to the “home movie” incident in the Miller’s basement. He finds the explosive and lights it, threatening Mr. Miller, but Evan accidentally drops it and it explodes, killing young Kayleigh. Now in an institution, with no journals in this timeline, Evan asks his mother to bring films from his birth. He barricades himself inside a doctor’s office and watching the film Jason shot of his mother in labor, travels back in time to his in-utero self, strangling himself with his umbilical cord. Having never been born, Kayleigh and Tommy go to live with their mom after the divorce, instead of their Dad. Lenny has a happy childhood. And Kayleigh ends up a well-adjusted adult, gets married and lives happily ever after.

“You have no lifeline, no soul. You were never meant to be.” – Madame Helga, Psychic

History in the Making

The Butterfly Effect is the third purported time travel film in a row on Sci-Fi Saturdays. And congratulations, this one appears to have hit the mark. It’s a bit more of a horrific film (bit not quite a horror film) than Timeline and Paycheck, which have much more action to them. The Butterfly Effect is more of a downer film, which ends tragically for the main character, Evan. Especially this edition, which is the Director’s Cut. The theatrical version of the film featured a much less dramatic ending. It was the first serious film with Ashton Kutcher as he began taking more adult roles, breaking out of his comedic background from That 70s Show, and his first films Dude, Where’s My Car?, Just Married, and My Boss’s Daughter.

The film also included a number of other recognizable faces, which audiences may or may not have known. Amy Smart had done a number of comedies and drama films including Varsity Blues and Road Trip. Ethan Suplee and Elden Henson had each been working for about a decade. Suplee was known for smaller roles in early Kevin Smith films Mallrats and Chasing Amy, as well as having a part in Road Trip along with Smart. Henson was known for his role in the original Mighty Ducks films, and has since starred in the Netflix/Marvel series Daredevil as lawyer Foggy Nelson. One of the surprising roles was Kevin Durand as Evan’s cellmate Carlos. This was Durand’s third role on his way to bigger and better roles such as Martin Keamy in the TV show Lost, and The Blob in X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

Genre-fication

The Butterfly Effect is decidedly a time travel film. But it takes the mechanism in an entirely different direction than almost every film before it. All of the classic time travel films involve machines of some kind that drive the characters to the past or the future. Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann, The Time Machine, and Freejack all have technological gadgetry involved in their time travel. Some other films, like 12 Monkeys, never specifically reveal the methodology the characters use to travel to the past. For this film, Evan’s is only capable of traveling into his own body–sort of like Sam Beckett in Quantum Leap–who can leap into other’s bodies, but only within his lifetime. This type of time travel is often referred to as “unstuck mind,” in which a character’s consciousness is transported between various iterations of their body. The earliest example of this is Kurt Vonnegut’s story, Slaughterhouse-Five, but can also be found in the character of Desmond Hume in the TV show Lost. Evan is also working within a closed loop paradox for most of the film. His blackouts in his childhood coincide with the times he will travel back to later in life, and are seemingly preordained. The only paradox that occurs is his final trip (at least in the Director’s Cut–which is the version reviewed here) in which he strangles himself as a fetus. Obviously, if he died before he was born he would never be old enough to time travel. Whoops!

The film’s story also owes an immense amount to the Ray Bradbury 1952 short story, “A Sound of Thunder.” It is one of the earliest uses of the term “butterfly effect” and tells the story of a time traveling safari that visits the Cretaceous period. In that time, one man steps on a butterfly, killing it, and inadvertently changes the future in unexpected and disastrous ways. This story was turned into a film of its own in 2005. Many time travel films often feature limited and unexpected consequences to their protagonists time travel shenanigans, but not necessarily world ending events. Back to the Future has Marty accidentally split-up his parents before they first met, as an example. The Butterfly Effect is similar in its scope. All of the changes that Evan manages throughout the film only affect himself and his small group of friends.

Societal Commentary

The true heart of the film lies within its themes of perfection within a lifetime. Evan’s realization that he can return to moments within his life to correct past mistakes is a common desire. Everyone has at least one point in their life that they would wish for a do-over. While some of these moments may seem benign, The Butterfly Effect points out that it’s never as clear cut as it seems. Evan changes the past so Kayleigh’s father never abuses her, making what seems like a better life for the two of them. They go to college together and are dating, but Evan is now one of the frat bros that he detests, and this path leads him directly to a violent stay in prison.

In life, there’s always things that will go great and things that will be bad. The film tells us that we cannot truly know the ramifications of any of our decisions, even with the best of intentions. Random happenstance and chance interactions all go into the myriad of choices that lead us to the present moment. And while it may seem like an easy decision to return to the past to prevent the death of a loved one, for example, altering the timeline can actually make things worse. The ending of the version reviewed above is the Director’s Cut, which has the most horrific and nihilistic ending of almost any sci-fi film reviewed here to date. The theatrical film featured a much more mellow ending in which Evan ruined the first playdate he had with Kayleigh and Tommy, which led to the events seen at the end of this film: the kids go to live with their mom and are never abused by their Dad. In that version, Evan survives and is seen crossing paths with Kayleigh at one point, but not recognizing her (or at least not choosing to recognize her). It’s a sad ending for the character knowing that he can never be with the woman that he loves, but at least presents an ending where the character can live out his life.

The Science in The Fiction

The Butterfly Effect opens with a quote attributed to chaos theory which states the idea of the “butterfly effect” is that the flutter of butterfly wings could cause a typhoon halfway around the world. As stated above, the origin of this phrase is generally attributed to Ray Bradbury’s 1952 story. However, the popularity of the phrase with the general public originated with 1993s Jurassic Park. Mathematician and chaotician Ian Malcolm speaks of chaos theory as such, “It simply deals with unpredictability in complex systems. The shorthand is the Butterfly Effect. A butterfly can flap its wings in Peking and in Central Park you get rain instead of sunshine.” At that point, due to the popularity of the film, suddenly millions of people were exposed to a new field of physics, taking the quotation at more of a face value.

The film also attempts to depict the physical consequences on Evan of his tampering with the time stream. After each trip into his past blackouts, Evan returns to the present and is confronted by a flood of memories that rewrite themselves. New images flood into his brain as older ones get erased, resulting in the recurring trope of a nosebleed. Psychic trauma is often depicted as a bloody nose, showing the exertion (or overexertion) of the character. Examples include Firestarter, the character of Eleven in Stranger Things, and the film that appears to have originated the trope, Scanners. Even with these changes, Evan still manages to understand that his new present-day is somehow wrong as he continues to attempt changing his luck for better.

The Final Frontier

Many articles and trivia about the film point out that Evan’s full name is Evan Treborn, which can sound much like “Event Reborn.” Obviously a slight nod to his abilities and the plot of the film. The naming of a character with an allusion to their standing in the story is a common enough trope. Apparently at one point there was the idea to actually name him Chris Treborn, but cooler heads prevailed.

There were two sequels in 2006 and 2009 that are unrelated to the events of this film, save for the titles. In fact, the third film uses an entirely different time travel mechanic. The Butterfly Effect is a film that will definitely make viewers think about causality. Whether it’s the silliness of some of Evan’s choices and actions, or how they as a viewer would alter elements in their own life. In any of the multiple versions of the film, the events are relatively shocking and unexpected for the uninitiated–even if the characters are a little flat.

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