The Butterfly Effect

As a child, Evan (Ashton Kutcher) begins to suffer from mysterious blackouts—a condition he apparently inherited from his father. To help him cope, his doctor advises Evan’s mother to have the boy keep a journal of his daily activities in hope that this will help them determine the reason for the episodes.

Later in life, Evan (now a college student majoring in psychology) discovers that, simply by reading the journal entries he wrote at various significant points in his life, he can travel back to those times and relive them. He begins to revisit his past to try to figure out the truth about his blackouts and his troubled childhood friends Kayleigh (Amy Smart), Tommy (William Lee Scott), and Lenny (Elden Henson). But he soon discovers that the disturbances to his friends’ lives caused by his revisitations cause major problems, and he is forced to travel back to the past again and again in increasingly desperate attempts to turn things around even as they continue to spiral downward.

Named for the meteorological theory that an event as small as the flapping of a butterfly's wings creates a tiny disturbance in the chaotic motion of the atmosphere that eventually becomes so amplified it leads to large scale change in atmospheric motion, so that the long term prediction of behavior of the global atmospheric system becomes impossible to forecast, the “Butterfly Effect” is more technically known the “sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” which states that tiny differences in initial conditions become amplified by evolution in a system, until two trajectories evolve quite separately. The amplification is exponential, so the difference grows very rapidly and after a surprisingly short time the two solutions behave quite differently.

The theory, and specifically its applications to time travel, has long been a favorite jumping off point of science fiction writers to criticize the foolish misuse of partially understood science, perhaps best exemplified by Ray Bradbury’s 1952 story "A Sound of Thunder" (currently being adapted to film, and once parodied effectively in an episode of “The Simpsons’), a story about a game hunter who is able to go on a time-traveling safari to hunt dinosaurs in the prehistoric era. When he unthinkingly kills a butterfly, he unknowingly sets off a chain reaction that will erase humanity from existence. In order to avert imminent disaster, a team of experts must return back in time and attempt to replace the butterfly.

Unfortunately, despite impressive special effects, despite the fact that it grapples with a number of interesting ideas and scientific theories, and despite the earnestness of the actors involved, ‘Butterfly Effect’ is not able to make itself into anything other than a remarkably average film. The problem here is screenwriters and first-time co-directors Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber (best known for their screenplay for the oxymoronic ‘Final Destination 2’), who fail to find an effective way to tell the story this movie should tell.

A more carefully crafted version of this story could have been an effective morality play about how the pain, depravity, and random events of a single person’s life ripple through the lives of others, and about the inability of any one individual, despite all the best effort and intentions, to effect positive change in the lives of others. Ultimately, though, ‘The Butterfly Effect’ wants to be tragedy of doomed love, with Evan and Kayleigh as a sort of a pomo Romeo & Juliet. Yet in the end, it doesn’t have the stomach for it—though it’s often (unnecessarily) exploitative, cynical, and defeatist, it also stops short of the classic tragic ending—everyone doesn’t die in the end.

I won’t give away the ending, but, in addition to suffering some logical inconsistencies, its rather stoic conclusion leaves room for doubt as to whether Evan’s goal was really to set things right, or simply to assuage the guilt he felt over the traumas and tragedies caused by the intersection of his life with the lives of others. And, as far as that goes, conscience does make time travelers of us all.

Matt Parks (February 8, 2004)