According to the chaos theory, the foundation of the new film “The Butterfly Effect,” the momentum produced from one flap of a butterfly’s wings is enough force to cause a typhoon halfway around the world.
This theory postulates that every action taken in the physical world has some effect on every other action. Therefore, if we could go back in time, anything we changed in the past would have dire consequences on the present.
“The Butterfly Effect,” the second major motion picture from directors Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber (“Final Destination 2”), attempts to illustrate what might happen if there was really a way to change the past.
Ashton Kutcher plays Evan Treborn, a college student with some serious holes in his past. As a child, Treborn was prone to blackouts, rendering him unable to remember certain events, usually of a traumatic nature.
A psychologist urges the pre-adolescent Treborn to keep a journal describing every detail of his life – what he eats, who he sees and every insignificant thing he does – in the hope of both jogging his lapsing memory and avoiding the same fate of his father, who was institutionalized for similar blackouts.
Evan’s mother (Melora Walters) moves him away from his childhood neighborhood and three best friends because of these terrible events he has no ability to either recall or understand. Treborn grows up to become a successful psychology major, studying, what else, memory loss at a local university.
When he and his roommate, a gothic Ethan Suplee, celebrate Evan’s seventh anniversary without a blackout, he inadvertently stumbles onto his childhood journals and decides to reminisce on a youth he doesn’t really remember.
After reading a passage he had written just before one of his blackouts had occurred, Evan finds that he has lapsed into an unconscious reality in which he experiences those moments his memory had repressed.
Scared to death and exhilarated at the same time, he returns to his hometown to verify the facts of his memories with his childhood girlfriend Kayleigh (Amy Smart). Unfortunately for Evan, the events he begins to remember prove too traumatic for Kayleigh to deal with. Evan finds that the life he left behind burned emotional scars beyond healing on his young friends.
After Evan begins to understand his past, he realizes how much he wants to change it. He discovers that his blocked memories are within his control.
Evan can prevent certain things from happening as they did before his intervention, and goes to great measures to do so.
With amazing performances from Kutcher and Smart, “The Butterfly Effect” takes a challenging plotline and leaves it believable. The storyline has very few holes, which is nothing short of surprising, and the actors tackle each of their transformations– and there are more than a few– with a credible realism.
The film draws the audience into the fantastic world of alternate realities and psychological abnormalities with true emotional insight into the human condition.
Grade: A
