The Butterfly Effect

[StevePulaski]

The Butterfly Effect (2004)
Directed by: Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber

Amy Smart and Ashton Kutcher.

Rating: ★★★

The Butterfly Effect was chastised upon release in January 2004, perhaps somewhat for being posited as an early-in-the-year throwaway thriller but mostly due to the overwhelming negative attention that followed Ashton Kutcher at the time. Up until then, Kutcher starred in a barrage of comedies, from the favorite Dude, Where's My Car? to Just Married alongside the late Brittany Murphy, and became a tabloid staple due to his relationship with Demi Moore at the time. It was a wonky era in American pop culture prior to the ubiquity of the internet and the "famous for being famous" gaggle of Kardashians where those who prolifically showed up in the "National Enquirer" or on Inside Edition were the ones people loved to hate. Just ask Ben Affleck, whose middling comedy-drama Gigli during a similar period is still regarded as one of the worst films ever made. Spoiler: it's not even the worst Ben Affleck movie.

I'm glad I waited to watch The Butterfly Effect many years after the fact for a handful of reasons. One, I don't think I would've been able to stomach one particularly violent scene even as a teenager. Secondly, a more impressionable age might've made me inclined to follow the initial critical groupthink that this film is somehow an artless piece of drivel, which is far from the truth. Despite its relatively low production, which echoes that of Smallville or one of those immeasurably popular WB/CW shows during the mid-aughts, The Butterfly Effect is a rousing, effectively creepy look at the chaos theory and the idea that a tiny action can have meteoric, life-changing consequences for yourself and others.

Evan Treborn — played by Kutcher, sporting shaggy brown hair and a patchy beard — gets a taste of those consequences. As a child, he suffered from recurring blackouts and multiple spasms that left his body shaking as if he'd been possessed. After struggling to remember many details of his life, Evan kept a meticulously detailed journal as a child. One of the motivators for this was a devastating event where a simple firework prank orchestrated by himself and his pals — Kayleigh, her younger brother Tommy, and Lenny — turned disastrous and left all the parties scarred. Kayleigh (Amy Smart), coupled with abuse from her pedophile father, became a shell of a human, Tommy (William Lee Scott) continued down a path of a violent sociopath, and Lenny (Elden Henson) became obsessive and sheltered.

It's in his college dorm-room that Evan decides to revisit these journals, which causes him to discover his ability to travel back in time to the most pivotal moments in his life. He gets a "do-over," so to speak, embodying his boyhood self in these moments with all the awareness and mental capacity he has an adult. He selflessly tries to save his friends from the problems that plague him in the present, but every time he's able to return to the present, he realizes his life, too, is drastically different. One change of events leads him to being a frat-boy with Kayleigh under his arm; a drastically different circumstance given Evan moved with his mother shortly after the aforementioned tragedy and had gone years without seeing Kayleigh. Another leads to him and Lenny, now a fully functioning young adult dating Kayleigh, being college roommates.

Most of these changes, Evan learns, leave several aspects to be desired. He comes to grips with the fact that you can't change the past without greatly altering the people you know in significant ways. The problem with getting a "do-over" is you kill, for lack of a better term, the person you knew to be yourself as well as uproot the lives of the people around you, maybe for the better but potentially for the worse. The butterfly effect is not the concept you want to entertain a great deal in reality insofar that, as the cliche goes, the past is the past and the choices you made are ones you must live with on a day-to-day basis. But entertaining the implausible or the unrealistic is something we humans do quite well, so therein lies the purpose for this flick.

The film was written and directed by Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, the two souls behind Final Destination 2 a year prior, which is debatably the best sequel in that franchise. Bress and Gruber do a commendable job jerking the audience around alternate timelines yet keeping the narrative linear enough to follow. The immediate handicap with films like The Butterfly Effect is the ensuing manipulation of time and chronology can get confounding, even maddening. Credit to the screenwriters for keeping it all coherent.

I found myself gradually more invested in the stories of the four central characters as the film went on. Bress and Gruber establish a tight-knit core of personalities in the early minutes, and by focusing on Evan — a likable enough everyman whose trauma and waning grasp on reality can be seen as relatable for people around his age — a POV is established. Things could potentially get muddled if the filmmakers were too giddy to switch up perspectives and permit all the friends the ability to travel in time. No matter the end result, the focus is firmly on Evan, and The Butterfly Effect benefits largely from a sole focal point.

It's also worth noting that the cast is a gaggle of diverse personalities. Kutcher and Smart retain a lovely platonic chemistry I believe most people have during their college years while Henson (who struck me as a find of an actor in The Mighty several years prior) and Scott bring an alternate dynamic to the troubled yet still vastly more stable duo. Supporting performances by a frightening Eric Stoltz and a humorously goth Ethan Suplee as Evan's college roommate too add flavor to a film that's never low on attitude. Mix in a satisfying theatrical ending and an alternate director's cut conclusion that will haunt me for the near future and The Butterfly Effect is an immensely satisfying pulp thriller.

Starring: Ashton Kutcher, Amy Smart, William Lee Scott, Elden Henson, Ethan Suplee, Eric Stoltz, Melora Walters, Logan Lerman, John Patrick Amedori, and Irene Gorovaia. Directed by: Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber.