The Butterfly Effect (2004)

The Butterfly Effect is a 2004 film starring Ashton Kutcher. It follows the story of Evan who has blackouts as a child, and as an adult in college realises he has the power to go back to those times he blacked out and change details. As the title of the movie suggests, these changes would butterfly out and have huge ramifications to who he was as an adult.

This is one of those movies which has ended up being quite divisive. Most critics didn’t think much of it when it came out, but a lot of audiences did (myself included), and in the thirteen years since its release, it’s gained a pretty solid cult following.

The core conflict Evan faces throughout The Butterfly Effect is presented quite succinctly by something he himself wrote in his journal. “If I can make scars, do I have the power to heal them?” he wrote. “What about Kayleigh’s scars?” The answer provided by the movie is succinctly presented by Evan’s own father during one of his attempts to change the past: “You can’t change who people are without destroying who they were.” And then, a couple of lines later: “You can’t play God, son.”

While this is the kind of thing which may have easily have been heavy handed in the wrong hands, I don’t think it comes off as heavy handed in The Butterfly Effect. While the core conflict of the film surrounds whether or not Evan can change the past, it’s framed in a way where this is a part of his coming of age. We’re presented with a young man who, like a lot of people in their late teens and early twenties, is still not entirely sure who he is as a person, and a part of him working out the finer points is him learning to embrace the less-than-ideal parts of his childhood.

This is the main reason why I prefer the theatrical cut to the director’s cut. In the theatrical cut, we’re presented with an ending where Evan finally accepts the central lesson of the film–that even though he has this power, he can’t go around changing things without there being disastrous effects–while in the director’s cut, he’s unable to accept this lesson and instead chooses to end his own life in order to save Kayleigh.

I think the theatrical cut makes better use of something that’s implied early on in the movie. While it’s possible for Evan and his father to travel back in time and change things in their own lives provided that they have something to focus their power, whether it be a journal entry, a photo album, a home movie, or something else so long as it’s personal to them, there’s a loose sense of destiny involved.

If you use the powers, eventually you’re destined to end up in an insane asylum at some point because of how many insane changes you’ll eventually make to the timeline. The conflict thus becomes whether or not you’ll be able to cheat your own destiny and either make it out of the asylum or be able to prevent things from getting that far. In essence, if you have the power, the challenge becomes to learn to not use it. Essentially, the theatrical cut’s ending works better with the coming-of-age elements of the film.

The one thing from the director’s cut that I wish had made it into the theatrical cut is that it introduced the idea that Evan’s mother had previously had two stillbirths. I think had this still been in, it would have implied that the typical solution to the problem of how to get out of the asylum was to commit prenatal suicide. This would have made Evan’s solution to use the home movie to get out of the asylum more profound–he was able to learn his lesson, accepting who he was, but also keep Kayleigh safe in the process.

Sometimes I’ve seen people say that this is the kind of thing which makes The Butterfly Effect come off as pretentious drivel. I don’t think the movie’s truly pretentious–it works just fine if you don’t think about the philosophical ramifications of what’s happening, but it’s undeniably there if you want to go into it.

I think that having a part of the film’s framing be about Evan coming of age and working out who he is in college is really what saved this movie from being pretentious, though. Had this just been a movie about some guy who works out he can go back in time and change things and then realises the butterfly effects he’s unleashed, it may have been this way; but thankfully this hole was avoided entirely.

There’s two other main reasons why The Butterfly Effect seems to be disliked by a lot of people. To be fair, these are both legitimate complaints, however they didn’t really bother me as much as they bothered a lot of other people, and I’ll explain why.

The first complaint that I hear about this movie a lot is that people dislike the quality of the acting. While this is true, I think that The Butterfly Effect isn’t like The Giver where there were members of the cast who are well known for giving good performances (something I noted in my review of it, by the way). Ashton Kutcher has simply never been that great of an actor.

Plus, the actual movie itself is something of an oddity. Each of the actors is playing a single character, they’re playing several different versions of the same character. This means that in a lot of ways, they were essentially playing three or four different characters over the course of the movie. While there certainly are actors in Hollywood who would have been able to pull this off well, I don’t think The Butterfly Effect‘s $13,000,000 budget would have allowed for many, if any, to be cast in it.

But also consider this: the fact that this movie didn’t have the greatest cast means that it had more of a cult movie feel to it. This is something that I think works very much in the film’s favour, because I don’t think there was any way that this movie was going to be a critical darling in light of the second common complaint I see.

The second common complaint that I typically hear about this movie is that it’s ridden with plot holes. The main one that people will point out is that when Evan goes back in time to stab his hands as a child, he probably wouldn’t have come back to the prison. Instead, even if his life had followed largely the same path as it had previously, he would have ended up in a prison for the criminally insane.

Even if he hadn’t gone to a prison for the criminally insane, his cell mate’s response probably would have amounted to, “Yeah, so fucking what? You’ve always had those scars on your hands.”

It is undeniable that there are plot holes in the movie. However, I think there is a potential explanation for the hole I just described–it’s possible that small changes in the timeline won’t necessarily cause a large ripple effect like some of the other changes Evan made. It’s also possible that the distortions that happen around Evan as his journey back through time begins will also allow for a small temporal bubble that only effects a person if they know what’s about to happen.

Of course, this is an unlikely explanation. Even if this were the case, Evan still would have had to go through a lot of psychological examinations after having drawn a disturbing picture and purposely stabbed his own hands.

Overall though, I do think The Butterfly Effect is a very good movie. It has a lot of philosophical stuff to consider while avoiding coming off as pretentious, even if there are a couple of plot holes and the actors weren’t the best.