Good film, surprisingly raw and obscure!

Rating: 7/10 (17 October 2005)

Although the twisted premise of "The Butterfly Effect" definitely sounded like my cup of tea, I was reluctant to go and see it right away, simply because I feared that the film would revolve too much on the popular teen-idol Aston Kutcher and also because it was very likely that sentiment and feel-good twists would overrule the obscurity of the basic story. Well, I'm happy to admit that I was totally wrong (happens quite often) and that "The Butterfly Effect" is, in fact, a powerful and honest thriller. Unlike other nowadays so-called thrillers that star popular names, the directors of this film are not afraid to add despair and in-your-face shocks, which makes it an involving and often unsettling cinema effort. Kutcher, these days better known as Demi Moore's toy-boy, also proves himself to be a fairly strong actor, capable of showing a wide range of emotions. He stars as Evan, an adolescent who suffers from severe blackouts every time he faces a trauma or difficult moment. He learns that, through these blackouts, he can cause a time warp and travel back to his childhood years when he and his circle of friends made some horrible, future-defining mistakes. He can then alter the past for everyone involved, which makes the film feel like a amalgamation of "Stand By Me" and "Time Cop". This mood-setting introduction is already quite good, with nice character developing and some hard sequences (Eric Stoltz in his vicious basement!) but the film even gets better when it seems that every time-travel goes horribly wrong. The moral of the story thus is that life can never be satisfying for everybody at once and that certain sacrifices eventually seems inevitable. You know that you've been watching a good film when you and the people you've seen it with are still discussing the story (and more particularly, the climax) hours after finishing it. "The Butterfly Effect" is such a film.