October 22, 2004
The Butterfly Effect
Ashton Kutcher .... Evan Treborn
Melora Walters .... Andrea Treborn
Amy Smart .... Kayleigh Miller
Elden Henson .... Lenny Kagan
William Lee Scott .... Tommy Miller
There might be spoilers in this review. Read at your own risk.
I remember when I first saw the trailer for this film (Dec 2003 b/c the movie was leased in Jan 2004). Even though I'm not a big Ashton Kutcher fan, I wanted to see it because it seemed like an interesting idea.
However, once the movie came out, every single review I saw for this movie panned it. Not one reveiw was favorable. So, I decided to skip it. I should've known better than to read the opinions on the IMDB boards. Holy cow are those people vitriolic!
Based on a scientific chaos theory known as The Butterfly Effect, which in turn is based a little bit on a Ray Bradbury short story called A Sound of Thunder, this movie follows the life of Evan Treborn. He routinely blacks out and because of these memory lapses, is encouraged to keep journals. He and his friends get into several bad situations and Evan eventually ends up moving away.
Fast forward to college. Evan is a Psych major who has gone 7 years without a black out. Perusing his old journals, he discovers he has the ability to travel back in time to that point. Using this knowledge, he goes back in time at several points to try to change the course of events. But of course, every time he goes back, something changes and not everything comes out the way he planned. He finally decides that he's the cause of the issues and goes back one last time to try to fix everything. The version I watched was the Director's Cut, which had some added scenes and a completely different ending.
Ashton Kutcher surprised me. He showed some real emotion in this film and didn't come off at all smug, which he tends to do. In one scene with the 3rd incarnation of Kayleigh (the heroin junkie prostitute), the emotion he gave to his character made me cry (which, ok, isn't really hard to do).
However, it is the acting of the younger versions of the adults that really stands out in this movie. Not only do they look like younger versions of their older counterparts, you can see the characteristics in the younger characters that carried over into the older characters. I'm not sure if that's the talent of the older actors or not, but either way, it really makes the movie work.
The plot itself does have some holes but you can overlook them because the time travel element is tricky and who's to say the holes aren't intentional?
I really liked the ending as well. I know that the theatrical release had a different ending (I discussed it with Susan before I watched this version) and that some people preferred the theatrical release to the Director's Cut version, but I thought both seemed to work well.
The special effects were great, especially the way they show the transition from present to past when Evan travels.
The prison scenes were a bit too long and too annoying to watch sometimes but other than that, this was a pretty decent movie.
Posted by xinh at October 22, 2004 02:09 AM