The Butterfly Effect Review
by Andy Keast (arthistoryguy AT aol DOT com)July 30th, 2004
The Butterfly Effect (2004): ** out of ****
Written and directed by Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber. Starring Ashton Kutcher, Amy Smart, Elden Henson, Eric Stoltz, Ethan Suplee and Melora Walters.
by Andy Keast
"The Butterfly Effect" is almost a fatalistic version of "Quantum Leap," that TV series about the man doomed to forever travel through time, making minor adjustments where things had "gone wrong" in history. There's also a dash of "Somewhere in Time" and "Groundhog Day." Ashton Kutcher plays the traveler, Evan Treborn, a kid who suffers from blackouts who has discovered a way "re-live" and change events from his past my reading old entries in his childhood journal. The catch: every permutation is for the worst, every time.
The house always wins. These are some of the most contrived lives the movie world has ever known. The tagline for the film is "Change One Thing... Change Everything," but a more appropriate one would be: "You can't be a winner at the
game of life."
The movie isn't so much about time travel but about how seemingly
insignificant
actions beget tremendous consequences. I understand that the film was going for this, but it's a theme that has been extrapolated before and far better in Kieslowski's "Red," and there is a cautionary novel by Philip K. Dick called *The Man in the High Castle,* set in an alternate present where Hitler has won the last great war and the Axis powers rule the world. The book functions as a
warning to those would allow madmen to tamper with history, as does Ray Bradbury's *A Sound of Thunder,* about a time-traveler who steps on a prehistoric butterfly, wiping out humanity. I imagine that the creators of "The Butterfly Effect" are counting on film's target audience to have *not* heard of any of these, but to instead think that "Run, Lola, Run" is "fascinating." You get the picture. It's the kind of film that drunk and unread college students would "reflect on" after watching it, and would probably want as part of their DVD collection, right on the shelf next to "The Matrix" and "Requiem for a Dream." It's a thinking frat boy's film. Many people I know who have seen it say they enjoyed it, albeit most of them took the ironic route, going in expecting an abysmal crap-a-thon and instead being pleasantly surprised. Is that what it takes?
But enough about the camp. The movie was marginally better than I had imagined, but the film is not as smart about its cause-and-effect themes as it pretends to be. The protagonist doesn't actually travel back in time but is somehow able to "transport" his consciousness "into" his younger self, which results in scenes where the young Evan must appear to other characters as a victim of demonic possession or split-personality disorder. I'm positive these
scenes were not intended to make me laugh, but they did. So, if he is able to change the course of events, how is he aware of the former present while in the
alternate one? Of course, his ability to travel back rests upon his continuing
to keep those journals, because if he changed something that resulted in his not writing them, you'd have a paradox, and no movie. "Back to the Future" got
around this by making Marty McFly an outside observer/modifier of space-time. Evan's trips back are internalized, and don't obey the film's alien logic.
This material might have worked in the hands of perhaps Terry Gilliam, but unfortunately the filmmakers are taking themselves far too seriously, which almost always results in the audience doing the opposite. Instead of addressing its own paradoxes, the film settles on tired Judeo-Christian symbolism. There seems to be a new unwritten rule with writer-directors who haven't thought their science-fiction films though: hide the story behind symbols, and your audience will praise how symbolic your film is. It's not as heavy-handed as the "The Matrix," but it's still there. Is it any coincidence that Kutcher's Christ-like haircut remains unchanged from childhood? I hear that in the original script the character's name was Chris Treborn (if one repositions the T, one has "christ reborn"). Could it be? Will we have to "watch it again to figure all the stuff out"? And of course there's the ending, which seems to be the antithetical of "It's a Wonderful Life." Anyone with even a base knowledge of comparative religion should see through this one.
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