The Bittersweet Effect

Rating: 10/10 (26 July 2011)

The Butterfly Effect is one of the most intriguing time travel films I've come across. A lot of time travel films focus a lot on temporal paradoxes, how to avoid them, and their consequences, or alternatively on the idea of predestination and the unavoidable fate...The Butterfly Effect though completely disregards all conventional time travel theory and talk of paradoxes, and instead seeks to use time travel as a means to convey a meaningful message-even if one had the power to play God, one can never truly set everything right because there is no such thing as a perfect world...
This is the lesson which the protagonist Evan Treborn (played masterfully by Ashton Kutcher) rather brutally learns, when he discovers his ability to revisit certain pivotal and traumatic events in his past and change them. When he returns to the present, he discovers that the smallest of changes he made to the past have compounded over time to literally create a new reality. As Evan explores these alternate realities and alternate lives he's created for himself, he discovers that in each of them, something has gone horribly wrong, either for himself or for his friends and family. This compels him to go back and change things again, only to make them worse each time. Ultimately, he does succeed in creating what is arguably as close to a 'perfect' world as is possible, but the sacrifice he's had to make has turned what should have been a 'happy ending' into a bittersweet one at best.
I think one of the most intriguing aspects of this movie is that how the smallest of changes can completely change the course of an individual's destiny and shape his or her personalities in completely unpredictable ways (much like the real-life concept of the 'butterfly effect' teaches how the smallest of actions can have unprecedented results over time)...and Evan's reactions to these alternate versions of his friends and family are interesting to behold. So in one reality, his love interest's a traumatized young waitress, in another she's a happy sorority sister, in yet another she's a prostitute, and she actually ends up as a corpse a couple of times...another childhood friend of the protagonist goes from being a psychopathic potential murderer in one reality to being a devout Christian missionary in another! And let's not forget the numerous avatars of Evan himself in each reality, some of them hilarious, others tragic...
The cast have all done a pretty good job, but ultimately its the story, and the underlying moral behind it, that makes this film a winner...