One of the more interesting movies I have seen lately.

Rating: Null/10 (10 February 2005)

I have always loved "science fiction" movies, because I have no trouble suspending my disbelief and just going along with the premise, and see what turns out. To be able to imagine "what if" that really could happen? I really enjoyed "Butterfly Effect." As they say in the trailer, "If you change one thing, you change everything." Evan (several actors at different ages) is not your usual kid, he has periodic "blackouts" and the doctors have no explanation. So at 7 he is asked to begin daily journal writing, and these journal entries become springboards for most of the drama for the second half of the movie. By our current scientific knowledge, what happens in the movie is clearly NOT possible, but it makes for a very thrilling two-hour ride.
SPOILERS FOLLOW. The movie begins in present time, grown Evan (Ashton Kutcher) is in a blue institutional coat, barricades himself in a room, and he mutters something as he writes a note, "If you find this note that means my plan didn't work out ... I need to go back and do something to save her." The 'her' was Kayleigh (Amy Smart, grown up), the girl he grew up with and is the only one he ever loved. In one of his 'going back' episodes, trying to prevent the death of someone else, the dynamite he was trying to dispose of accidentally killed Kayleigh. But I am getting a bit ahead of myself...
When the kids were 13, smoking cigarettes and looking at 'Hustler', Kayleigh's mean brother Tommy suggests they blow something up. A stick of dynamite stored for years in his dad's thermos, the fuse is too short so Evan has them use his short cigarette as a fuse extension. Slow to blow up, a young woman and baby come home, go to get the mail, and they die in the explosion. This messes everyone up, I suppose if Evan had not suggested the fuse mod, everything would have turned out different. When Evan and his mom move away in a moving van, he holds a note to the window for Kayleigh, "I'll come back for you." But he doesn't.
Cut back to the present time, Evan is in college, excelling in Psychology, interested in "memory association." He celebrates seven years with no blackouts. But he and mom go to a Psychic as a joke, she looks at Evan's hand and horrified says, "You have no time-line. You were never meant to be." Which was prophetic. But he goes back to find Kayleigh, who was a waitress, she is angry the way her life turned out, "Why did you leave me here to rot?" Back at college he receives a phone message from Tommy, "She killed herself tonight. She's dead ... and so are you."
Evan by now had figured out that through mind control he could read a particular journal entry and go back to that point in his life and, perhaps, change things. He goes back to age 7 when Kayleigh's dad was trying to make a porno video in the basement with Evan and Kayleigh, and in his adult voice but as a 7 year old, told their dad to never touch Kayleigh again. When he awoke, everything was different. He was a frat boy, Kayleigh was in his bed with him. But Tommy had grown up a criminal because dad's perversion had become directed at him instead of at Kayleigh. Tommy showed up on campus, there was a fight, Evan beat and killed him in self defense, but was imprisoned awaiting trial.
Finally deciding to make everything right, he went back to prevent the explosion in the mailbox incident, they save the mother and child, but Evan gets both lower arms blown off, Kayleigh grows up as the girlfriend of another. Still another attempt, to destroy the dynamite years earlier, results in Kayleigh's death at 7. Setting up the final scene where in a final desperate act of love for Kayleigh, Evan views a home movie taken in the hospital when he was about to be born. He goes back to that point, as a baby about to be born, and strangles himself in his mother's womb, as a way to save Kayleigh.
I understand from reading elsewhere that this director's cut on the DVD ends differently from the one shown in theaters. The whole movie illustrates the point that "if you change one thing, you change everything." Near the end of the movie, grown Kayleigh tells Evan that she lived with her dad because she wanted to stay near Evan. So, if Evan had never been born, her life would have turned out different. In the brief glimpses we see at the end, indeed all of Evan's friends turned out to have better lives.