You’d think Hollywood would run out of ways to mess with time, but here we are again with The Butterfly Effect, a so-called “science fiction thriller” starring Ashton Kutcher. Yes, that Kutcher—the one who made a career out of looking confused on television and in that awful movie about finding a car. This time, he’s playing Evan Treborn, a college student who had a deeply messed-up childhood filled with traumatic events and convenient blackouts. The kind of childhood that only a couple of scriptwriters who also penned Final Destination 2 could dream up. Our hero soon discovers that by reading his childhood journals, he can physically travel back in time to his younger self during those blackout periods. You know what that means: time to fix the past!

But, because this movie actually believes in the “Chaos Theory” it name-drops at the start—you know, the old butterfly wings causing a hurricane nonsense—every attempt Evan makes to correct one tragedy just leads to a completely new, and somehow worse, timeline. One minute, his childhood sweetheart, Kayleigh, is safe; the next, she’s a junkie prostitute. He tries to save one friend from a psycho brother, and the other friend ends up institutionalized. It’s a never-ending merry-go-round of misery, all thanks to a guy who probably can’t even remember where he parked his real car. Get ready for a depressing, yet strangely compelling, look at how the past is best left alone. Seriously, stick to my era’s time travel movies, like Back to the Future—at least those had some laughs and a decent-looking Delorean. This one’s got a pretty boy and a whole lot of unnecessary child trauma.

Review by Ben Dover

Good grief, what a gloomy load of self-important, over-dramatic hogwash. The Butterfly Effect thinks it’s some profound, mind-bending philosophical statement on destiny, but really it’s just a long excuse to watch poor Ashton Kutcher frown for two hours straight. I’m sixty years old, I’ve seen some things, and I can tell you this: changing the past is for schmucks in a three-piece suit named Marty, not for a college kid with a stack of journals and a bad haircut. The whole concept is messy, and not in the clever, “chaos theory” way they keep patting themselves on the back for.

The story itself is just one horrible event piled on top of another. Child abuse, animal cruelty, dynamite—I mean, come on, dynamite? What is this, a Warner Bros. cartoon? And then they toss in the time travel gimmick so our hero can “fix” it, only to find a new reality where he’s a double amputee or his friend is a killer. It’s like the writers just threw darts at a board of “worst possible outcomes” and built a plot around it. The constant shifting of realities gets tiresome. It’s supposed to be shocking every time he lands in a new hellscape, but after the third or fourth time Kayleigh goes from sorority girl to streetwalker, I just started checking my watch. Pick a lane, movie!

And speaking of Ashton Kutcher, I have to give the kid a begrudging nod. For an actor mostly known for playing a dopey stoner—which, let’s be honest, he probably is in real life—he actually tries to act here. He’s not going to win any awards from me, but he manages to look genuinely pained through most of his various parallel lives. It was also fun to see Amy Smart, who plays Kayleigh, have to flip-flop between being a good girl, a bad girl, and an institutionalized mess. She’s definitely the highlight. But man, the sheer misery of it all. Doesn’t anyone make a nice little comedy anymore? Do all these young people need to be constantly reminded that life is awful?

The biggest logical hole, which drove me absolutely nuts, is that this movie is called The Butterfly Effect, meaning small changes have enormous, unpredictable consequences. Yet, when Evan intentionally stabs his hands with those pointy desk spikes as a kid, creating two hideous scars, his entire adult life remains exactly the same in that timeline! Only the scars appear. So, the movie’s own central premise is totally ignored just so they could have a cool shot of his hands. It’s lazy writing, pure and simple. If stabbing your own hands in the middle of a classroom doesn’t change a single other damn thing, then this whole “chaos theory” is as flimsy as one of those butterfly wings they keep talking about.

This movie did make a lot of money, which I suppose means the kids these days like being miserable. Good for them. For me, it was a high-concept mess that should have spent less time trying to be smart and more time making sure its own rules made sense. It’s got some decent acting, a good idea buried under too much doom and gloom, and a director’s cut ending that is so utterly depressing it makes the theatrical one look like Mary Poppins. I’ll stick with the original timeline, thank you very much, where Ashton Kutcher was just making me laugh on That ’70s Show.

The Stars

• Ashton Kutcher as Evan Treborn: The main character who discovers he can mentally time travel to his childhood blackouts by reading his old journals. Kutcher, best known for comedy at the time, attempts to carry the dramatic weight of the film.
• Amy Smart as Kayleigh Miller: Evan’s childhood sweetheart and main motivation for his constant timeline changes. Smart does a good job portraying the vastly different, tormented versions of Kayleigh across various realities.
• Elden Henson as Lenny Kagan: Evan’s troubled friend. The actor also had to portray multiple versions of the character, from institutionalized to happy and stable.
• William Lee Scott as Tommy Miller: Kayleigh’s violent, sadistic older brother. He serves as a catalyst for much of the trauma in the children’s lives.
• Eric Stoltz as George Miller: Kayleigh and Tommy’s abusive, pedophilic father. Stoltz brings a creepy edge to the role that’s genuinely disturbing.
• Melora Walters as Andrea Treborn: Evan’s long-suffering mother, who is constantly worried about her son’s mental health, a worry that is completely justified given his powers.

Special Effects and Music

The special effects are thankfully kept to a minimum and focus mainly on the visual jarring of Evan jumping through time. The most notable effect is the green screen work used to make Ashton Kutcher a double amputee in one of the alternate timelines—a genuinely shocking visual, though it’s still just green screen and post-production trickery. The color grading also changes with each alternate reality, giving the different timelines a distinct, dreary look—a cheap but effective way to signal that things are different, and usually worse. The visual effects for the moment Evan enters a new memory, where the world sort of twists around him, are simple but effective, I suppose.

The film’s score, composed by Michael Suby, is a blend of orchestral and electronic suspense. It’s moody and atmospheric, as it should be for a psychological thriller, but it doesn’t have a lot of memorable themes. It’s what you expect a 2004 “edgy” thriller to sound like—lots of mournful strings and unsettling electronic noises. The real music of note comes from the soundtrack, featuring bands that the youth of the early 2000s were all listening to, like Oasis (“Stop Crying Your Heart Out”) and Jimmy Eat World (“Hear You Me”). It’s a blatant attempt to appeal to the mall-goth crowd, and I’ll admit, those songs do make the sad bits even sadder. I prefer Sinatra, myself.

Rating

2.5 out of 5 stars. Way too depressing and the plot holes are as big as Kutcher’s ears.

Synopsis and Plot Breakdown

Evan Treborn is a college student who has experienced severe blackouts and memory loss during traumatic events throughout his childhood at ages 7 and 13. He has been keeping detailed journals of his life, encouraged by his therapist, to help him piece together the missing chunks of his memory. He has been told these blackouts are a psychological defense mechanism, a condition inherited from his institutionalized father who was eventually killed by an asylum guard.

Evan is reunited with his childhood friends: Kayleigh Miller, who is now a waitress and still deeply troubled by their past, and Lenny Kagan. Kayleigh’s sadistic older brother, Tommy, has been estranged from them.

After Kayleigh commits suicide, Evan finds that by reading his old journals, he can physically travel back in time to the moments of his blackouts, allowing his adult consciousness to inhabit his younger body. He sees this as a chance to correct the terrible past events that ruined their lives, starting with an incident where he, Kayleigh, Tommy, and Lenny were forced to participate in a child pornography video by Kayleigh’s pedophilic father, George.

Attempt 1: Evan successfully scares George into leaving Kayleigh alone. He returns to the present to find Kayleigh is now his happy, sorority-girl girlfriend, but his fix has created a much worse tragedy. Tommy, now a psychotic bully who had his father’s abuse turned onto him, has become violent and targets Kayleigh. When Evan intervenes, he accidentally kills Tommy in self-defense and is sent to maximum-security prison.

Attempt 2: While in prison, Evan uses another journal to jump back in time to an earlier event where the four children accidentally caused the death of a mother and her baby while playing with dynamite. He tries to prevent the incident, but the resulting chaos causes Lenny, who was already emotionally fragile, to snap and murder Tommy with a metal shard. Evan returns to the present to find Lenny institutionalized and Kayleigh now a drug-addicted prostitute who despises him.

Attempt 3: Desperate, Evan travels back to the dynamite incident again, this time trying to stop it by getting burned himself. He returns to the present as a double amputee. His mother, heartbroken by his disability, developed lung cancer, and Kayleigh, while safe, is with a happy, non-institutionalized Lenny. Still, Evan’s life is ruined and his mother is dying, proving that he cannot find happiness without someone else suffering terribly.

Evan, realizing his attempts to “fix” things only cause greater, unforeseen damage, comes to the grim conclusion that he is the destructive factor in all of their lives. He makes a final, desperate jump into a family home movie to the day he first met Kayleigh as a child. To ensure that he and Kayleigh never become friends, thus stopping the chain of events that leads to their shared trauma, he whispers something hateful to her and runs away. He then awakens in his college dorm, a complete stranger to a happy and successful Kayleigh and his friends, all of whom have lived normal, untroubled lives without him.

Famous Quotes

1. “It has been said that something as small as the flutter of a butterfly’s wing can ultimately cause a typhoon halfway around the world – Chaos Theory.”
2. “If anyone finds this, it means my plan didn’t work and I’m already dead. But if I can somehow go back to the beginning of all of this, I might be able to save her.”
3. “Wrong answer, fuckbag. This is the very moment of your reckoning.” (Evan, as his 7-year-old self, to George Miller)
4. “More fucked up than I am? You think you know me? I don’t even know me!“
5. “I hate you and if you ever come near me again, I’ll kill you and your whole damn family.” (Evan, as his 7-year-old self, to Kayleigh in the final attempt to sever their friendship).

Notes from the Movie

1. Multiple Endings: The film has a heavily debated Director’s Cut ending that is significantly darker than the theatrical release. In the Director’s Cut, Evan travels back to the moment of his birth and strangles himself with his own umbilical cord to erase himself from existence entirely, ensuring everyone else’s happy lives. The theatrical ending is the one where he passes Kayleigh on the street as strangers.
2. Casting Choice: The casting of Ashton Kutcher was highly controversial at the time, as he was primarily known as a comedic actor. However, he also served as an Executive Producer on the film, which some believe helped push the project forward.
3. Color Coding: The filmmakers used different color grading for each alternate reality to visually cue the audience on the timeline shift. For instance, the prison scenes were often washed out and muted, while the “happy” college life timeline had brighter, more typical suburban colors.
4. Inconsistent Rule: A major point of criticism by actual critics (not just grumpy old me) was the scene where Evan mutilates his own hands to gain stigmata-like scars. According to the film’s “Chaos Theory” premise, a dramatic event like that should have significantly altered the entire timeline, but aside from the scars, everything else in his present remains exactly the same—a huge plot hole.
5. Sequels Exist: Despite the mixed critical reception of the original (it was panned, but a commercial success, making about $96 million on a $13 million budget), it spawned two direct-to-video sequels: The Butterfly Effect 2 (2006) and The Butterfly Effect 3: Revelations (2009), neither of which are worth talking about.

Trailer

You can see a clip of Evan’s desperation in one of his realities here: The Butterfly Effect Movie CLIP – You Were Happy Once (2004) HD. This video clip shows one of the heartbreaking alternate realities where Evan tries to reason with an altered, and very unhappy, version of Kayleigh.

Notes:

We never really know how any of it happens, he goes to sleep and dreams and thats it?

Changing Kayleigh’s past from that point forward would not have erased the abuse… it was happening before, this was just Evan’s first exposure. The whole movie is a series of this stuff, at least until the end….

Amy Smart is fantastic and shows off some great range.

The plot hole where he proves his stuff with the hand holes makes no sense, he would have been sent to a nuthouse and everything would be different but it changed nothing at all.

I feel like it should have ended where its all the ravings of a madman and the other characters were people in like a mental institution he is just giving roles and making up in his head, at least it would make more sense then, the baby killing itself is just stupid. Then what the dad doesn’t molest Kayleigh for some reason?? Just stupid.

It’s weird because its both thought provoking, and bad. I remember the premise and some of the thoughts from when I saw it 20 years ago, but blocked out a lot of the movie itself, mostly due to the traumatic content I suppose. I really hope I can do it again. Suffice it to say this will be my last viewing of this. I hope someone does something cool with the premise someday.

Love how it makes you think, hate the movie itself.

The best thing about this movie is that it is not either
The Butterfly Effect 2: Some Sequels do NOT need to be made or
The Butterfly Effect 3: The third time is absolutely not the charm