Note to self: Don't write anything down. Wait, maybe I better not write this

Rating: 8/10 (2 February 2004)

The Butterfly Effect, unfortunately marketed as most notable because of a turn from idiot comedy to strong dramatic performance by Ashton Kutcher, begins with a title explaining one of the tenets of Chaos Theory, specifically that a butterfly flapping its wings starts a chain reaction of events that can result in a hurricane on the other side of the planet.

Interestingly, a theory which has almost nothing to do with this movie.

This movie is not about a butterfly flapping its wings and causing a hurricane tens of thousands of miles away, it's about a butterfly that flaps its wings, deciding to fly intself toward a deadly spiderweb or toward a safe open field of sweet flowers, and the effects that that single decision has on that same butterfly's future life, not on the weather occurrences on the other side of the planet.
Kutcher plays Evan Treborn, a kid who inherited a thinly described mental disorder from his father, who has lived most of Evan's life in a hospital for the criminally insane. The specifics of his disorder are not important, as the effects are explained by the movie. We meet Evan as a young boy, creating concerns among the school staff by drawing a picture of a knife-wielding person standing over a lot of bloody corpses when asked to draw a picture of what he wanted to be when he grew up. Grisly, yes, but the artistic ability in the drawing is stunning. It should have been more childishly drawn were it's artistic competence to garner not a single mention from the teachers so worried about it.
In order to work toward a solution to the problem, the school psychologist suggests having Evan begin to keep a journal, sort of as a way to map out his thoughts and see if they might be able to find out what happens in the periods when Evan `loses the time,' as Aaron Stampler from Primal Fear described his similar experiences. These journals later in Evan's life provide him the opportunity to sort of mentally travel through time and change occurrences that happened in order to change the disastrous future.

When I think about the change brought about by the small things that Evan goes back and changes, I'm reminded of a film released last year called Thirteen (which, at the time of this writing, I haven't seen). Parents may find themselves disturbed at how Thirteen presents how easily a perfect daughter can be turned horribly wrong by hanging out with the wrong people. Incidentally, this is where a thin version of the above-mentioned Chaos Theory comes into play in The Butterfly Effect.
The difference between a butterfly causing a hurricane by flapping its wings and the chains of events in this movie is that the butterfly flapping its wings falls victim to a fallacy of logical thinking called `post hoc, ergo prompter hoc' (`After this, therefore because of this'). Certainly an interesting theory, but one that can never be proven because no hurricane could ever be traced back to a single event that, had it never taken place, might have resulted in the absence of the hurricane. The Butterfly Effect's version is much simpler. The path of life has many forks, and different choices in life lead to different futures.
A Simpson's episode that dealt with this exact idea comes to mind. In an amusing alteration of a famous science fiction story, Homer manages to build a time machine out of something that only he could build a time machine from  a toaster. Back in the time of the dinosaurs, he accidentally squishes a bug, then travels back to the present to find the world totally transformed. Ned Flanders as the all-powerful diddly-dictator, his family extremely classy but without the existence of donuts (too much for Homer to bear, so he tragically travels back again to fix it before realizing that donuts fall from the sky like rain), they're back to normal but eat with their tongues like lizards, etc. Each time he travels back in time, he changes something and returns to the present to find things completely different. The difference in The Butterfly Effect is that the things that Evan changes affect only him and his friends, and apparently no one else.

Evan has grown up to be a productive college student, studying psychology in hopes of learning something about his troubled past. I won't go into how odd it is that he reveals deeply disturbing things about himself as well as having been forced to perform in a child pornography video and yet nothing ever came of it (maybe no one ever read his journals, just like they never noticed his obvious artistic brilliance because they were too concerned over his extensive use of the red crayon?), because the important thing is that he is later able to read through these old journal entries as a sort of portal to travel back to the time at which they were written so that he can change events that had tragic affects on the lives of him and his friends.

There are scenes in The Butterfly Effect that are genuinely scary, and the film itself has a thoroughly creepy feel throughout (not the least reason for which is a gigantic amount of hugely disturbing scenes involving the characters as children - many of which went beyond the extent necessary in order to get their point across). These are, incidentally, the reason that the film at many points becomes campy and callous, surely inspiring a good portion of the many negative reviews of the film. Little kids acting in ways that little kids are not supposed to act can be pretty funny, that's why South Park was such a huge hit, but I could certainly have done with significantly less profanity and violence from them (maybe a few less vicious death threats and one or two fewer 2X4's to the face would have been beneficial).
The logic behind the traveling back in time and the mechanisms of the switches from one reality to the next is never very clearly explained, although given the scope of the swinging from present to past and back and forth again, had it been shown it would really have been a rather trivial issue. The jumps back in time are interesting in that Evan is literally able to jump into his younger self, speaking and acting as an adult though still a young boy, quickly and efficiently changing specific events and thus instantly altering the future (although not eradicating from his own memory the alternate future that he just fixed, even though he fixed things so that they never even happened  thus enters the paradoxes always involved with time travel). There are also things that don't make sense on a logical level in the movie. Here's a question, for example - if Evan knew about what was going to happen when the lady walks over to her mailbox with her baby, why did he run up and stand right in front of it when he went back to prevent their deaths? You would think that he would have anticipated the blast, since he knew exactly when it was going to happen.
I liked The Butterfly Effect a lot more than I thought I would, I had heard a lot of bad things about it. It's strange in that it starts off with a very interesting premise, then starts to get a little rough and border at times on being campy, but ultimately comes around full circle and I found myself more impressed than I anticipated when I saw the story come around and explain why it started the way it did and what the beginning scene meant. It's one of those films that starts right in the middle (maybe because even the film doesn't understand Evan's mind), and then ultimately comes back to that point, gradually revealing the meaning of the film as a whole. Leave the kids and most of your desire to apply logic to the movies at home and it's thoroughly enjoyable.