Powerful film with disturbing themes, The Butterfly Effect will ripple your wings!

Rating: 8/10 (18 November 2018)

This movie was an emotional shock fest. It delivers a brisk pacing in quickly unveiling a story that will haunt and challenge the way you feel about the life you have lived, and the choices you have made. Let me ask you two questions, and be very honest with your answer, because no one will know: Have you ever been hurt as a child? Have you ever hurt a child? Now let me ask you one last thing, if there was a way to change things, would you? Could you? How would you? The Butterfly Effect, simply put, is a supernatural phenomena of trying to go back to a time when something went wrong, and try to make it right again. Doing so, how would that change things? The question isn't how would it change things, the question is how would it alter other events. The film explores deep and troubling subject matter. I don't want to give away anything big, let's just say a couple of young children are put in a situation that no child should ever be in, and from here, we set a the concrete on the foundation that The Butterfly Effect will be built on. From here, we have a chain of painful events. Very bad things happen in this movie. Very bad things! We don't question why they happen, we just accept that they happened. The film pursues the possibility that you CAN go back and change things, as our hero does unusually just by reading his journal, which he uses to try to remember phases in his life blocked out by blackouts. What he doesn't realize, is that by going back and trying to do things for the better, it's really turning out for the worse. The movie silently begs the question: Is it really better to be dead then alive? What good is it saving something thats broken? From here, I developed a deep caring for all the characters. Not justifying what some of them have done, but understanding why they've done it. And it's all about how we handle ourselves once good or bad things have been done. For everything that we do, good or bad, there are either rewards or consequences. For example, a practical joke is pulled in the movie, but a family was severely impacted by this cruel prank. The film will continually knock you around with one emotional blow right after the other, but the last twenty minutes will leave you feeling as if you've been uppercut under the jaw. Very powerful, very moving, very difficult film to watch, but I think this is one that has to be viewed more then once if you really want to get it. I think the first time you watch it, you just feel it.