Butterfly Effect Movie Review

Movie Review of The Butterfly Effect

It's not everyday that one may watch a film that can be categorized in all of the genres of drama, thriller, sci-fi, and love. However, in J. Mackye Gruber and Eric Bress's movie, The Butterfly Effect, they do just that. Throughout the film, a young man, Evan Treborn, played by Ashton Kutcher, who like his institutionalized dad before him, has memory blackouts that he must deal with. After several years had passed, Evan discovers a supernatural technique to alter his entire life and find his vanished and harrowing memories. Unfortunately, in order to relive these moments and recollections in his past, there are critical and severe consequences.

To begin, Evan is born and raised in a small town with his hard- working, single mom. He begins to develop a strong friendship with the fellow neighborhood kids and continuously seems to find himself in some kind of trouble or mischief . On top of it all, Evan suffers from these harsh blackouts, finding himself in a whole other place. After these instances, he has no recollection of the occurrences, and thus, wakes up very confused. Needless to say, neither his friends nor family played by Amy Smart and Eric Stoltz truly believe that these incidents are honestly happening. They figure it is his way of covering up and attempting to stay out of trouble. Ironically enough, Evan's dearest friend, Kayliegh (Amy Smart) begins to grow depressed and violent after all of these situations that Evan has no control over. He yearns to help his friends, but it's impossible when he can't even remember these specific harrowing memories. As the years pass, he continues to have less and less black outs and eventually, they become a dark part of his past.

However, Evan devises a technique of traveling back in time to inhabit his childhood body and eventually causes irreparable damage. Evan keeps copious notes in a journal about everything he's gone through before and after the incidents. He races back and forth throughout his own life, procuring his notebooks and re-reading them to hopefully fix things. After an eventful and oft tragic childhood, Evan starts looking for answers and becomes a college psyche major. In his attempts to work through his blackout illness, he discovers that his unique disability allows him to go back in time and relive those blacked out memories. Evan attempts to fill in every blank and re-capture those moments. As he attempts to mend the broken lives of those closest to him from his childhood, he finds that every trip into the past brings chaotic results into the present, leading him to travel back again and again and causing irreversible damage. Though this occurrence is not necessarily believable, this one issue added to the sci-fi and creativity in the film

Though I found several occurrences throughout the movie that weren't realistic and believable, I thought that the main actors, Ashton Kutcher, Amy Smart, and Eric Stoltz, did an excellent job portraying these circumstances as realistic as they could. While Kutcher's acting is better than expected, he does get a little melodramatic sometimes. It was interesting to see Kutcher apart from his usual goofy titles and characters. Their true theatrical abilities were revealed when all the main actors had to play and depict numerous and extremely diverse versions of their own characters throughout the film. For instance, Amy Smart does an excellent job in acting the different versions of Kayleigh. From radiant beauty and happiness to street