The Butterfly Effect (2004)
You can’t change who people are without destroying who they were.
THE SUMMARY: A guy discovers he has the power to go back in time and change events, so he keeps trying to create a better timeline only to realize changing the past isn’t always beneficial for the future. In concept, I love it - wondering how the world would be if you took this path or that one is fascinating. In practice though, The Butterfly Effect underwhelms with bad writing, terrible acting performances, and two remarkably awful endings.
FROM MOVIE-PICKER DEEPERKING: One of the first films that left me thinking about it for days afterwards. Makes you imagine the different timelines of your life.
JAMIE AND JEANNE’S AI FACESWAP ART:
One more DVT and this will be reality.
The (Body Positive) Matt & Blonde Show.
The real Blonde would be smoking weed.
Far scarier than Nazi murder.
THE BEST:
The general idea: Everyone has experienced significant loss, or if you haven’t, you will. And everyone has wondered how things might be different if only we had intervened, if only we had said something, if only we had acted differently. The assumption in that thinking is that things would certainly be better if we did, but that’s not necessarily true. Every decision we make has consequences, good and bad, and even through good intentions, bad things still happen.
That’s because there’s something fundamentally true we all have an obligation to accept: there is no reality without pain and suffering. No matter what you do, no matter how good of a person you are, no matter how critically you think about your every move, pain and suffering are coming for you. So the lesson is not to seek a life without it, necessarily. The lesson is to manage it, and to give it purpose, and to understand that without pain and suffering, there can be no joy either. So you must find a way to give it meaning, and to move beyond it.
That’s why it’s important to live without regret. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t learn lessons from bad behavior - we should. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think carefully about our words and actions and be intentional with them - we should. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care about mistakes we’ve made - we should.
It just means that to dwell on the past is to assume you had the power to create perfection anyway, and you didn’t. You can only do your best with each decision in the moment, and move forward from there.
Amy Smart, crack whore: For a movie with mostly terrible acting, Amy Smart as crack whore Kayleigh was a very good performance, and very good in makeup and costume too. She was convincing, and even though she often exhibited the same over-acting as the others, her ability to move between different versions of the same character, from sorority house to whore house, was impressive.
Actually, I guess those houses are kinda the same. But you get what I mean.
The hilarious hate speech: This probably isn’t worthy of praise, since they were both passing moments in the movie that were supposed to be dramatic and not crack me up, but whatever. I was laughing, and that makes for a good time. Tommy telling his movie-husher to ‘shut up, f**got’ was hilarious. I need to pull that sounder.
Likewise, when Evan is trying to join the Nazi gang in prison, saying he must because he won’t be ‘joining up with no sp*cs or n**gers,’ and that among his qualifications, he ‘ain’t no f**king k*ke,’ I was dying in the same way I did watching American History X. It’s not supposed to be funny at all. But I’ll be damned if it isn’t. Even if it is a stereotype that’s supposed to prove stereotypes are bad, or something.
Amy Smart, crack whore.
I thought he was actually gonna do it.
THE WORST:
Terribly acted scenes are unintentionally hilarious: In fairness to the acting performances, some of the writing is so forced and cringe (see below), I’m not sure there was any real way to perform this script well. But that doesn’t fully excuse these horrendous moments and more:
Tommy… just everything about him: Who gets this enraged at his sister getting an innocent kiss? And how does he so easily beat up a dude twice his size? And if you were that pissed off about it and that good at fighting, why wouldn’t he just kick Evan’s ass instead of this bizarre dog-burning stunt? And why would these guys ever hang out around this kid if he acts like this anyway?
The Tommy character was so preposterously over the top, lacking any nuance whatsoever. Depending on the timeline, he’s either completely deranged and murderous, or a total saint choirboy. There’s no reality in which he’s just a regular person who sometimes screws up, and sometimes does nice things. And why? Nothing that bad even happens to him. His sister gets beaten and child-raped, so he goes crazy? He got it easy.
Laughing at the cripple: In the timeline in which Evan got blown up, he gets frustrated and falls out of his wheelchair. And college-aged students around him start pointing and laughing, and Kayleigh gets enraged yelling congratulations to them for being so ‘goddamn perfect.’
This is a completely absurd scene. In no world, anywhere, not even among the most debased college degenerates high or drunk out of their minds, are people laughing at a crippled person who falls out of a wheelchair. Literally everybody would be coming to offer help, or just moving along when help is being provided.
This point could really go in either spot, since it’s stupid in concept and also terribly over-acted by Kutcher and Smart. But since the bad writing list is already long, I’ll just drop it here.
Kayleigh running off like a two-year-old: When Evan finds Kayleigh at the restaurant, she becomes oddly enraged at him asking about a very important formative life moment for both of them, and runs off screaming like my two-year-old does when he can’t have cookies for dinner. Even if the conversation went badly, or it’s an emotionally difficult experience, adults don’t do this. I’ve had plenty of emotionally traumatic experiences. Some of them life-altering, some of them not that serious in retrospect. The number of times I’ve scampered away from one like this? Zero. The number of times I’ve seen anyone else do that, women included? Zero.
A foot shorter and still beat his ass - I bet.
Literally nobody would react this way.
Terrible writing often makes no sense: Is the acting bad because the writing is un-performable? Or does the writing look worse because the acting is so bad? I’m inclined to believe it’s more of the former, but the two flaws with this movie combine to drag it down.
Why would Kayleigh be mad about Evan wanting to discuss their abuse?: The scene where Evan meets Kayleigh at the restaurant to ask about what happened with her pedo dad is preposterously absurd. First, if Evan wanted to have this conversation, wouldn’t he brace her for it, and perhaps arrange a time to do it, and not drop it on her in public? Second, even if he did, and Kayleigh has objections to how casually he’s treating it, why would she become enraged at him wanting to learn more about how they were abused as children together? Why is she acting like he has no right to the knowledge, or like it isn’t his business? Third, Kayleigh is completely comfortable with all sorts of personal questions to start the conversation, without emotional outburst at all. Why is she comfortable talking about getting emancipated from her pedo dad because he was abusive, but if Evan asks about also getting abused, that’s way too emotionally bothersome?
Fourth, and most insanely, am I to believe that Evan and Kayleigh have never discussed this event together before? They both got pedo-abused at a young age, and for 10+ years, never talked about it all? Evan knew he blacked out during the event, and never thought gee, maybe I should ask what happened when that really creepy guy told us to undress in front of lights and a camera? Kayleigh never saw fit to tell him either? They were like ten in this scene. They were old enough to realize something is terribly wrong with it, hence Evan’s curiosity and Kayleigh’s emotional trauma.
I could write an entire review about just how moronic this scene alone is. Alas, moving on.
Why would Evan let Tommy beat Kayleigh on the second try?: When Evan first goes back to ‘fix’ Tommy’s dog-burning event, he still lets Tommy smack Kayleigh in the face with a big block of wood. Why? He’s going back to save the dog, but not stop his girlfriend from getting a serious injury? If the answer is because he’s only trying to change the most consequential things and nothing else, okay, but then why does he do unnecessary things otherwise, like kill Tommy to end the better timeline?
Why would Evan’s mom not tell him about his dad?: Why does Evan’s mom keep her dad’s condition a secret from her son, knowing they both exhibit similar traits and behaviors? I couldn’t find a video clip of the scene, but when Evan is at dinner with his mom, he asks her directly about whether his dad had figured out a way to recover memories he had lost, and she dismisses his question and refuses to answer, despite her full knowledge. Why in God’s name would she keep secrets about this condition from her son? She knows something is wrong, or at least unique with him. She knows what it did to his dad, which was institutionalize him and get him killed, and she doesn’t want her son to have that knowledge to avoid or minimize the likelihood of the same fate? Insanely stupid.
What is the purpose of Evan’s obese degenerate roommate Thumper?: Yes, if you read on, I write about how all lives matter and such. And they do. But every rule has an exception, and this guy is it. Delete this entire disgusting, obese, degenerate, pointless character. Everyone’s lives would be much better if they did. Why do I have to see him in irrelevant, gratuitous sex acts? Why do I have to see him at all, actually? He contributes nothing to the story, and nothing to the entertainment. He actually isn’t even mentioned in the entire multi-paragraph Wikipedia plot summary. Point proven.
But like… why are you mad, though?
The guy that actually should be deleted.
Both endings are pure trash: I thought I hated the ending, and then I saw the alternate ending and it’s even worse. I hate the theatrical version ending where Evan goes back and scares Kayleigh away from him, and they both become happy successful adults without each other, because it implies that your deletion from the lives of others can be a good thing, and that perhaps it’d be good if you deleted yourself in such a way. But at least it’s not the deletion of your life outright - the premise is removing yourself by association, not removing yourself from this world.
The ‘director’s cut’ alternate ending presents the same idea in the literally fatal way: Evan goes back to being a pre-born baby and strangles himself with the umbilical cord, which again produces a great future in which Kayleigh never knew him and she lives a happy, beautiful life because of it.
This is a dangerous, nihilistic, but most importantly false moral principle. Your life has purpose and value intrinsically, and nothing would be ‘improved’ by its deletion, through murder, suicide, or any other method. To grant the premise that people would be wise to end certain lives to build better futures is anti-human, anti-God, anti-happiness, anti-wellness, anti-prosperity… anti-anything good. This premise justifies the entire spectrum of intentionally-inflicted death, from genocide to killing yourself just because you’re sad. It should be rejected completely, because it confers God-like powers onto men to decide which lives are worth living and which lives aren’t.
Making the alternate ending even dumber, how does Evan have the adult cognitive capability to commit suicide as a fetus? Does his power to go back in time give him special abilities he didn’t have the first time around, besides knowledge of the future itself? Did this baby that strangled itself also have his education, and his memories of Kayleigh, and all his adult brain capacity? What are the rules on age here?
And why put his mom through all that pain? If Evan can do this fetal suicide stunt, can he just go back to being the fertilized egg and not implant? Why make his mom carry him for nine months and suffer the trauma of a stillbirth? Dick move, baby Evan.
Though I guess he can only go to where journal writings or home videos direct him, and the video of his own conception… well, that may have been a worse ending still.
No, life is not better without you around.
How did they make the ending worse?
THE RATING: 3/5 Wickies. Love the concept. Hate the execution. There’s enough entertainment value to make the watch worthwhile, but The Butterfly Effect is a missed opportunity for something truly great, that indulges far too deeply in degenerate moral philosophy.
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NEXT WEEK: Oldboy (2003) - NOTE: We are watching the 2003 South Korean original, not the 2013 American remake.
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