The Butterfly Effect
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| The Butterfly Effect | |
|---|---|
 The Butterfly Effect theatrical poster |
|
| Directed by | Eric Bress J. Mackye Gruber |
| Produced by | Chris Bender A.J. Dix Anthony Rhulen |
| Written by | J. Mackye Gruber Eric Bress |
| Starring | Ashton Kutcher Amy Smart Eric Stoltz Elden Henson Ethan Suplee |
| Music by | Michael Suby |
| Cinematography | Matthew F. Leonetti |
| Editing by | Peter Amundson Kirk Moses |
| Distributed by | New Line Cinema |
| Release date(s) | January 23rd, 2004 |
| Running time | 113 min 120 min (director's cut) |
| Country |  United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | US$13 million (production) $20 million (marketing) |
| Followed by | The Butterfly Effect 2 |
| IMDb profile | |
The Butterfly Effect is a 2004 American sci-fi/drama movie starring Ashton Kutcher, Amy Smart, Eric Stoltz, and others, distributed by New Line Cinema. The Butterfly Effect is directed and written by Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber.
The title most likely alludes to the butterfly in Ray Bradbury's short story "A Sound of Thunder", in which a small change triggers a large series of ripple effects. Ten years later, Edward Lorenz dubbed this concept the butterfly effect, a term often used in chaos theory.
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[edit] Plot summary
Evan Treborn (Ashton Kutcher), who suffered severe traumas as a boy (John Patrick Amedori), copes with the pain by blacking out at moments of high stress. While searching for an answer to heal his emotional wounds, he finds that when he reads from his adolescent journals, he travels back in time, and is able to essentially "redo" parts of his past. There are consequences of his choices, however, that he then propagates back to the present; his alternate futures vary from frat boy to prisoner to amputee. As he continues to do this, he realizes that even though his intentions are good, the actions he takes always have unintended consequences. In addition, he needs to go further back in time after every attempt as several fatal mistakes he makes do something to wipe out that and all subsequent journal entries.
[edit] Plot
[edit] The age of 7
In his childhood, Evan Treborn begins to experience sudden memory blackouts. His mother, Andrea, fears that he might have inherited his father's mental illness. His father, Jason Treborn, is in an asylum. Evan's doctor advises Evan to keep a daily journal to train his memory.
A first blackout happens in 1989 at school while Evan is drawing a picture of his future. The very detailed picture shows a man with a knife, standing over two bodies covered in blood. Evan's teacher is rather worried and shows the picture to Andrea. Evan doesn't remember having drawn it.
Evan experiences a second blackout at home, when Andrea accidentally sees her son holding a knife. Evan has no recollection of picking up the knife.
Another day, Evan is at his neighbor's house, playing with his best friend and first love, Kayleigh Miller. Kayleigh's father, George, asks him to be in a movie about Robin Hood. There is a third blackout — Evan finds himself standing in the basement of Miller's house, naked. By his side stands Kayleigh, similarly undressed. It is apparent that they had been forced to participate in a child pornography video.
Evan's mother talks with a doctor about Evan's strange behavior, who convinces her that Evan may be acting out because he has no father figure in his life. They arrange for Evan to visit his father as a remedy.
Evan experiences a fourth blackout when he sees his father, Jason, at the clinic. The meeting starts as it should, but all of sudden there is a flash — and Evan finds himself on the floor with his father trying to strangle him. The guards burst in, and while (violently) restraining Jason, kill him.
[edit] The age of 13
Kayleigh's parents get divorced, and her mother moves in with her new family. Kayleigh and her brother, Tommy, are offered a choice of which parent to stay with. Kayleigh chooses her father, in spite of the abuse she suffers at his hands, because she doesn't want to leave Evan. Tommy goes with his sister to protect her from her abusive father. He then blames Evan for the abuse he receives and is abusive to Evan and others around him, making him into a budding sociopath.
The fifth blackout happens in 1995 when Evan spends his time with the Millers and Lenny Kagan, another childhood friend. While hanging out together one afternoon, they find a dynamite stick and decide to play a prank with it. They plant it in a mailbox, light the fuse, and wait. Again, a flash indicating a blackout — Evan and others are running through the forest, and Lenny is catatonic. Evidently something terrible happened, but Evan can't remember what it was and no one will tell him. Lenny is taken to the clinic in a state of deep shock.
Not long afterwards, Evan, Kayleigh and Tommy sneak into the movie Se7en. Kayleigh leaves when she finds one of the earlier scenes disturbing, and Evan follows her out. He apologizes, and says it was a bad idea. Kayleigh asks him about the forest, and he comforts her. Afterwards they kiss. Then Tommy walks in. He threatens the couple in a fit of rage, but is tripped by an older boy, who Tommy nearly beats to death for embarrassing him. He is subsequently taken away by security.
Afterwards, Evan, Lenny, and Kayleigh are seen walking in the forest, and they come across Tommy attempting to burn Evan's dog. Evan rushes Tommy, who beats him back with a large chunk of wood. Kayleigh's face is severely lacerated and she is knocked unconscious. Evan has his sixth blackout, and awakens to see the ashes of his dog.
The Treborns move away from town. Evan promises Kayleigh that he will "come back for [her]", but never keeps his promise. Kayleigh supposedly tries to move closer to Evan, but her father forbids it.
[edit] The age of 20
In 2002, Evan is in college, majoring in psychology. When he brings a girl back to his room, she discovers his old diaries and Evan reads about the events preceding the sixth blackout. In a flash, he returns to the past and learns that Lenny tried to free the dog, but couldn't untie the ropes. This leads him to return to his hometown to find Lenny isolated in his unchanged childhood room, finding him now extremely antisocial. After speaking to him, he realizes the vision in his room really happened. Seeking to reproduce this strange effect, he reads an extract about the fifth blackout and learns that while they were waiting for the dynamite to blow up, a woman with a baby came to the postbox and both were killed by the explosion. Waking from this dream, Evan finds that the cigarette burn he experienced in this memory has appeared in the current reality. Talking with his mother, she implies that his father had the same ability to travel through time.
Determined to learn more, Evan visits his childhood town to find Kayleigh. After a brief conversation, he starts asking about the video her father had forced them to do; his questions stir up very unpleasant memories, and the next day, Kayleigh commits suicide. Evan extrapolates from his cigarette burn that he may be able to change the past through his diaries. He reads about the third blackout, jumps in the past and very effectively threatens George Miller into treating his daughter with respect and disciplining Tommy. The vision ends, and Evan returns to the present.
[edit] The second timeline
In this new timeline, Evan and Kayleigh are a couple. Kayleigh is a sorority girl and Evan seems to be a leader in a fraternity. Kayleigh has come to Evan's place, because in this timeline, her father was good to her (due to Evan informing him about her suicide in her years to come). However, her brother Tommy, who has recently returned from the reformatory, has become even more violent and disturbed, as his father abused him instead of Kayleigh. He traces Evan and Kayleigh and attempts to kill Evan. Evan manages to overcome Tommy using mace spray and accidentally kills him with a metal pole in his fury. The police come just in time to apprehend Evan, who is put in prison.
Evan persuades his religious cellmate to help him by producing stigmata much the same way as the cigarette burn before. He travels back at the age of seven in the classroom when he creates the disturbing drawing and impales his hands on paper pins. With his cellmate's help, Evan manages to get hold of his diaries and returns in the sixth blackout. He gives Lenny a sharp iron shard so he can cut the dog's rope. Moreover, he succeeds in talking Tommy into releasing the dog. Suddenly, Lenny stabs Tommy with the shard, killing him. A glimpse of Lenny going catatonic is visible, then Evan wakes up.
[edit] The third timeline
Evan is back in his original dorm room. While his memories flash back, he discovers that Lenny is now kept in the asylum for killing Tommy. Going to visit him, Lenny reveals that he could tell Evan knew something big was going to happen that day, and that he feels Evan should be locked up in his place. Evan travels back to his meeting with his father and asks him how to break the cycle. His father tells him that it is impossible; the only solution left is to stop and accept things as they are, saying that even now by coming back he could be killing his mother. When Evan persists, his father decides that the only way to stop Evan is to kill him and leaps over the table to strangle him.
Evan returns to Kayleigh's house and asks her dad where she is, and discovers Kayleigh has become a prostitute and a visible drug addict. From talking to her, Evan supposes that if he could prevent the death of the woman and her baby from the mailbox explosion in the fifth blackout, Lenny wouldn't have gone insane, Tommy won't be killed and Kayleigh wouldn't have been traumatized. He returns to the past and rushes to the postbox. Tommy unexpectedly follows him and brings the woman to the ground. The explosion hits only Evan, although from a distance.
[edit] The fourth timeline
As Evan slowly wakes up in his college dorm room, he sees Lenny and Kayleigh in the other bed, whom he mistakes for his old roommate. As the events and their changes come flooding back into Evan's mind, the scene pulls back to reveal Evan has no arms anymore. Evan's arms had to be amputated and his legs become paralyzed as a result of the mailbox explosion. Kayleigh and Lenny are now together (Lenny appearing noticeably trimmer than other incarnations of himself during the film), and Tommy has become very religious. Evan reveals to Kayleigh how much he loves her. Kayleigh in turn tells Evan that the only reason she chose to live with her father was because if she had gone to live with her mother, she might never have seen Evan again. She further says that, if Evan wasn't disabled, they might have become lovers. Distraught, Evan attempts to drown himself in a bath tub. Tommy runs into the bathroom and saves him. He also finds that in this timeline, his mother started smoking heavily after the accident, and now has cancer. First, Evan returns to the moment when he grabbed the knife at the age of 7; he searches through the kitchen, looking for something with which to destroy the dynamite, but before he can do so, he returns to the future again. After this failure, Evan returns to the time of the third blackout in the Millers' basement, planning to destroy the stick of dynamite so it can never be planted in the mailbox. He lights it to threaten George Miller as before, but he drops it and Kayleigh picks it up. She is killed in the explosion.
[edit] The fifth timeline
Now Evan is kept in a mental institution for killing Kayleigh. Moreover, he finds out that in this timeline his diaries never existed, as he had started writing them after the events in the basement. However, by talking to the same doctor, he does discover that his father traveled through time by using an old photo album (which, similarly to the diaries in this timeline, cannot exist in any of the previous one). He makes his last attempt to fix everything, using an old film about the first acquaintance with Kayleigh. Upon his meeting Kayleigh, Evan now threatens to kill her family unless she stays away from him to prevent their becoming friends. As Kayleigh runs away, terrified of the boy and crying to her mother, Evan whispers to her, "goodbye".
[edit] The sixth timeline
At last, everything is fine. Nothing stops Tommy and Kayleigh from moving to their mother's house, and they are raised properly. Tommy (once again) becomes quite religious. Lenny is Evan's roommate, as they study in the university. In order to save Kayleigh and the rest, Evan had to sacrifice her friendship. Evan burns all his diaries and films, as he is content enough with the present and recognizes the instability and delicate nature of the timeline. At the very end of the film, Evan passes by Kayleigh on a busy street in Manhattan. They notice each other and Kayleigh stops, but by the time Evan turns to look, she has already begun walking again. Although it is obviously painful, Evan realizes he must not follow her. The look on his face is grim and pale.
[edit] Director's cut
The Director's cut of the movie adds some amount of depth to the storyline, but differs only a little from the theatrical version of the film, as well as providing a bit more detailed look at Evan's ability. Other than small extensions here and there, the added scenes include Evan's mother telling him about her stillbirths as well as a scene during the prison section of the movie where the prison guards are shown working with the particular prison gang that Evan comes into contact with. This results in the gang getting a hold of numerous keys, allowing them to break into Evan's cell at night, with the implication being that they follow through with their previous threats and raped him. Another added element in the director's cut is when Evan's mother takes him to see a storefront psychic who tells Evan that he was born with no lifeline, that he was not meant to be. That he has no soul. Evan waves it off and takes back the money, and leaves.
The ending of the film differs at the fifth timeline. In this version, Evan finds a film of his mother giving birth. He goes "into" the video, and kills himself in the womb by strangling himself with his umbilical cord, so that he will not interfere in anyone else's life again. This results in a stillbirth, and implies that the other stillbirths his mother experienced were similar children with the same curse and ability who grew up and created alternate timelines as well, and eventually came to the same conclusion that Evan did. Writer/directors Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber state in the film commentary that this was their original intention for the finale, as it emphasized Evan's choice of self-sacrifice for those he loves more than the original theatrical version. After Evan kills himself, the other people whose lives were originally mutilated by grief are briefly shown to be living their lives a bit happier (Evan's mother had told him that she was pregnant twice before him and that they were both stillbirths). In the last scene, a voiceover of his mother says that she was pregnant three times before. This is because Evan's mother is shown having a new child -a girl. She is saying to her new child, "before you I was pregnant three times", meaning that Evan is the third stillbirth. Kayleigh and Tommy go to live with their mother and lead a good life. They both graduate from college. Kayleigh gets married.
There is also another ending, derided by the directors, where Evan, upon seeing Kayleigh on the street in New York, follows her, implying he will attempt to form some sort of relationship in the present day, instead of meddling with the past. The directors apparently never liked the more optimistic ending to begin with, and it was quickly discarded from consideration during editing.[citations needed]
[edit] Black out timeline
Every time Evan changes his past, he goes to the exact moments when he blacked out. In the early sections of the film we watch young Evan black out several times. Later, we see an adult Evan travel back in time to possess his former childhood self; it is through these temporal journeys that Evan is able to create new distinct timelines. In the first timeline we witness, Evan simply blacks out traumatic moments; later, he is able to revisit these blackout moments by re-reading journal entries about them, which suggests that the blackouts could have been caused by his ability to revisit the past and he "blacks out" when his future self is revisiting his past self. As revealed in the fifth timeline, Evan only began writing the journal entries in response to the blackouts. Thus, the blackouts caused Evan to write the journal, which allowed Evan to travel back to the blackouts, which in turn caused the blackouts in the first place, which caused Evan to write the journal, and so on.
[edit] Production mistakes
- Whenever Evan would jump back and change something, no one notices any changes when he comes back. However when he proved that he could change the past to his cellmate Carlos by going back to the age of seven and impaling his hands, Carlos was able to notice that the stigmata had appeared on his hands.
- When Evan is in the psychologist's office as a teenager under hypnosis, the light in the background is on, then it jumps to a different camera angle, then it jumps back to the previous shot and the light is off then all of a sudden is turned on. This is described in the commentary for the director's cut as a 'happy accident.'
- When Kayleigh, Tommy, Evan and Lenny are putting the blockbuster in the mailbox, Evan puts the cigarette on the blockbuster and says it should last Lenny 2 minutes, but his mouth says 10 minutes. (Audio/visual unsynchronized)
- Evan is portrayed as a member of a fictional fraternity in the movie. However, in the original script he is a brother of Theta Chi Fraternity which is a real fraternal organization. Although, the final script changed this to portray the fictional fraternity, it is still shown in the credits that one of the members of the hazing scene was a "Pledge of Theta Chi."
- In the prison sequence, it becomes apparent that Evan has yet to go to trial over Tommy's murder, meaning he shouldn't be in prison yet, but possibly in county jail with a slightly better atmosphere around him.
[edit] Featured cast
| Actor | Role |
|---|---|
| Ashton Kutcher | Evan Treborn |
| Amy Smart | Kayleigh Miller |
| Melora Walters | Andrea Treborn |
| Nathaniel DeVeaux | Dr. Redfield |
| John Lowe | Professor Carter (as John B. Lowe) |
| Eric Stoltz | George Miller |
| Kevin Durand | Carlos |
| Ethan Suplee | Thumper |
| Grant Thompson | Hunter |
| Callum Keith Rennie | Jason Treborn |
| Elden Henson | Lenny Kagan |
| William Lee Scott | Tommy Miller |
| Lorena Gale | Mrs. Boswell |
| Irene Gorovaia | Kayleigh Miller at 13 |
| Jesse James | Tommy Miller at 13 |
| Kevin Schmidt (as Kevin G. Schmidt) | Lenny Kagan at 13 |
| John Patrick Amedori | Evan Treborn at 13 |
| Sarah Widdows | Kayleigh Miller at 7 |
| Cameron Bright | Tommy Miller at 7 |
| Jake Kaese | Lenny Kagan at 7 |
| Logan Lerman | Evan Treborn at 7 |
[edit] Comparisons
Ashton Kutcher and others have stated that this movie is a combination of two classics: Back to the Future (time travel elements) and Jacob's Ladder (mind vs. reality).
This is among many other recent movies such as Abre los Ojos, The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, Donnie Darko, Final Destination, Minority Report and I ♥ Huckabees, with an existentialist theme.
In addition, the plot is somewhat similar to that of the films Frequency, Run Lola Run, and Mr. Destiny. Also; the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Tapestry", the The Fairly OddParents episode "Father Time", and a Danny Phantom episode "Masters of All Time", as well as any number of other films and television series episodes on the theme of "remaking" one's own life, or at least visiting a timeline in which one had made one critically different choice. A similar theme involves timelines in which, as in It's a Wonderful Life, one doesn't exist at all.
Another similarity is with the film and book Slaughterhouse-Five. When Evan goes back in time he is in his younger self's body and there are not two versions of himself running around. Most other time traveling films, besides The Butterfly Effect and Slaughterhouse-Five, use the latter time travelling method.
[edit] Trivia
- One of the pennants on the wall of Kayleigh's sorority room in the second timeline says "Bradbury". This is a reference to Ray Bradbury.
[edit] Awards and nominations
- 2005 Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films (Saturn Awards)
- Nominated — Best Science Fiction Film
- Won — Pegasus Audience Award — Eric Bress, J. Mackye Gruber
- Nominated — Choice Movie: Thriller
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
