After a short scene with (Evan) Ashton Kutcher as a crazy person, we flash back to him as a child. Evan (now Logan Lerman) has a fun life- his working class mother has an annoying voice, he has never met his father due to him being in a mental home, and his best friend Kayley has a paedophile for a father. To add to this, he keeps having mysterious blackouts in his memory, so he (and the audience) is unaware of the last few minutes� events. To combat this, a psychiatrist suggests Evan start writing journals of everything that happens in his life.
As a teenager, played by John Patrick Amedori, things aren�t much better. Evan�s group of friends is Kayley, who�s depressed, her brother Tommy, who�s psychotic, and Lenny, who�s a bit tubby. Evan is still suffering from the blackouts, but things look up a little when he and Kayley grow closer. Unfortunately, this pisses off Tommy to no end, and two major events lead to Evan moving away.
Now a college student, Evan is free from blackouts, and sharing a dorm room with a big fat Goth (Ethan Suplee). He no longer sees his childhood friends. Revisiting the journals he wrote as a child, Evan discovers that he has the ability to go back to his life as a child and change the past- he realises this was the reason for his blackouts. His investigation of this leads to a grown up Lenny (Elden Henson), Kayley (Amy Smart) and tragedy, so he decides to go back and mess things up majorly. Coming back to a completely new life, everything seems peachy. It�s not, because that would make a shitty movie, so Evan continues to revisit his childhood, where his seemingly good deeds have increasingly bad consequences.
Production-wise, there�s nothing much to complain about. Everyone does a fine job of acting, including most of the kids. Teenage Tommy is a little annoying, but playing a child psycho can�t be particularly easy. The two writer/directors, Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, although occasionally resorting to cheap trick scares via editing, manage to make an entertaining enough movie- at no point does it lag at all. The heavy themes of paedophilia, suicide and being a dirty hooker stop it from being exactly enjoyable, but it stays watchable and intriguing to the end.
With that in mind, the script is what fucks this movie over royally. It seems as if when writing the script, Cress and Gruber had some initial ideas they wanted to cling to- namely the blackouts and the journals- no matter how poorly they ended up serving the story. The inclusion of the blackouts was obvious- this is the time when Evan revisits his past. They also serve to let us know which moments are the most important parts of Evan�s life. On some occasions, he revisits his life but changes nothing. It makes sense that as a child he blacked out during these times. However, he shouldn�t really be having memory loss at the points where things were changed, as they make his life have a different outcome. It�s very difficult to explain without lots of time, diagrams and a physics degree, but it was a distractingly plot hole.
At another point in the movie, Evan talks to someone about his journals. That someone tells him that he never had any journals, but makes it clear that he had talked about them. The thing is, the Evan from that reality, if that�s what you want to call it, really shouldn�t have known the journals existed. And then there�s the mixing of time travel theories, which isn�t really very successful.
I know it seems as if I�m just picking at stitches here, but the point is with a couple of rewrites, these problems could have been fixed, and we�d have another awesome time travel movie. If Bress and Gruber were willing to dump the journals as Evan�s method of time travel, and cut back on the blackouts, then this movie would be getting much higher marks.
Clearly a lot of effort was put into the making of The Butterfly Effect. Despite its many flaws, it was definitely interesting enough to watch the whole way through. It�s worth a rental, but probably not a purchase. Bress and Gruber show a lot of potential, and I hope they keep working together- hopefully their next project will be something to get excited about.
