['Tis the season to be busy, so here's another bust from the archives, of a film that is a perfect example of Hollywood's willingness to misinterpret the meaning of scientific terms* in the cause of a good movie title.]
The Butterfly Effect (2004) is an American science fiction thriller romance film written and directed by Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, starring Ashton Kutcher and Amy Smart.
In the end, history-altering, time-travelling teenager, Ashton Kutcher, decides to forsake the love of his life, Amy Smart, for the greater good, by sabotaging their first meeting.
While reading a passage from his childhood journals to a curious date, undergraduate psychology student Kutcher experiences a fit during which he finds himself reliving an episode from his past, filling in one of many previously missing parts of his memory, when Smart's viciously bullying brother burned Kutcher's pet dog to death, tied up in a sack.
The details of Kutcher's recovered memory are confirmed by a childhood friend who witnessed the incident, which prompts Kutcher to deliberately revisit another episode from his past, the details of which he has until now been unable to recall, where his friend was traumatised after being bullied by Smart's brother into placing a lit explosive in a mailbox, the explosion from which kills a mother and baby.
In an attempt to get to the bottom of another lost memory, Kutcher visits Smart who he has not seen since he and his mother moved away following the accident with the explosive. Tragically, Kutcher's visit proves so upsetting for Smart that she kills herself.
Hoping to save Smart from the memory he hoped she might help him recall, that eventually drove her to suicide, Kutcher revisits another blanked episode when Smart's abusive, paedophile father manipulated the 7 year old Kutcher and Smart into making an obscene video. Kutcher uses the threat of Smart's future suicide to terrify her father into leaving her alone and doing something to control her bullying brother.
Kutcher's intervention has a significant impact on the present, where he and Smart, no longer an insecure waitress but also a college undergraduate, are now a happy couple. However, their life together is destroyed when Smart's brother, further brutalised by the discipline Kutcher encouraged his father to inflict, attacks Kutcher in a jealous rage, and is killed in the ensuing struggle, sending Kutcher to jail, where he finds himself surrounded by even more brutality.
Intending to save Smart's brother from a life of violence and therefore himself from eventual jail, Kutcher revisits the incident involving his dog's death.
Claiming that he can atone for the death of the mother and child his friend was responsible for, by helping Kutcher free his dog from the sack, Kutcher presses a shard of scrap metal into his friend's hand. However, instead of freeing the dog, Kutcher's friend uses the shard to stab Smart's bullying brother to death.
So although Kutcher avoids jail, he finds his friend committed to an insane asylum and the equally traumatised Smart has run away from home, descending into a life of drug addicted prostitution.
Determined to set things straight, Kutcher returns to the mailbox incident preventing the deaths that lead to his friend's murder of Smart's brother. As a result, his friend and Smart become a happy student couple, and Smart's brother himself turns into a committed christian do-gooder. But, in doing so, not only loses both arms in the explosion, but also leads to his mother's development of terminal lung cancer from the chain smoking she resorts to as a result of his injuries.
Desperate to save his mother, Kutcher returns in time to destroy the explosive kept by Smart's father in the basement of their home, only for it to accidentally kill the 7 year old Smart, sending the traumatised Kutcher to the insane asylum for life, before he has a chance to begin writing his journals that allow him to undertake his trips into the past.
Kutcher's only remaining hope lies in some home movie footage he persuades his mother to bring him to watch in the asylum, which he uses to revisit the first time he met Smart and her family.
Instead of making friends with her when they are introduced, his is rude and threatening, so that when her parents separate, she and her brother choose to live with their mother, and never become involved with Kutcher or his friend. At which point Kutcher decides to destroy all materials that he could use to trigger any further trips into his past.
Many years later Kutcher has a chance encounter with the grown up and successful looking Smart who he passes on a crowded city street. She only seems to show a vague recognition of the grown up Kutcher, who decides not to introduce himself, and walk on by.
The Butterfly Effect is another example of a movie that almost defies busting, because of the convoluted way in which its plot unfolds. It isn't until the very end of the movie that the full story can be appreciated. Indeed, in this case, the final reveal is so understated that it might go unnoticed.
It sounds obvious to say that you really need to watch the whole movie to know what it's about. But too often, the arc of a story can be divined almost from its opening scenes. One that manages to keep you guessing right up to the final credits is a rare treat, and should be savoured.
*[The title of the movie refers to the metaphorical butterfly effect, a popular principle in chaos theory which states that in any dynamic system, small initial differences may over time lead to large unforeseen consequences. However, the changes that are effected by Kutcher's character in the story are neither small nor insignificant.
The butterfly effect is a common trope in fiction when presenting scenarios involving time travel and "what if" cases where one storyline diverges at the moment of a seemingly minor event resulting in two significantly different outcomes.
However, more accurately, what the trope represents and the movie portrays is the cascade effect where an unforeseen chain of events occurs, due to an act affecting a system.
Of course, "the cascade effect" doesn't have quite the same ring to it as "the butterfly effect" does ;)]
Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Butterfly_Effect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascade_effect
