A very under-rated movie

Rating: 8/10 (22 July 2004)

I don't understand why more people don't appreciate this movie. It is very well directed. & While the acting is not top notch, Ashton, as well as the rest of the cast, does an adequate job. This movie is driven by the story. Evan grows up with a very strange problem! He has gaps in his memory. Not over time like most of us do, he has gaps about events that just happened. He doesn't understand what is going on or why. But because of his problem, his mother, who understood the problem because is father had a similar problem, takes him to a shrink. The shrink's idea is to have Evan keep a journal of everything he does. The problem is, he doesn't remember these events, and so he can't log them. Fast-forward to Evan grown... He has witnessed several life-altering events in his life, most of which he can't remember any details of. He finds one of his journals when he is in college, & reading some of the pages, he realizes that he actually DID log the events. While reading about one of them, he suddenly finds himself back in time, watching the event thru his own eyes as he must have watched them as a kid. Apparently, these gaps are like time portals in his mind. Where he can go back & view the events, or more importantly, change his role in them. His efforts & the effects of them are what follow. What I believe this story is built on is that EVERY person in the world as had events in their past that they would LOVE to be able to go back & change. But, would life turn out similar to your current one if you had. Going back & getting an A on the math test in 3rd grade might have kept you from being grounded all summer, but then, because you were outside, your friends were too, so now, one of you friends you grew up with dies in a car crash, which destroys his family. Mother ends up in the nut house; sister ends up a crack-head... Our lives touch so many people in so many ways that to go back & change anything changes the entire world around us. Changing one little thing causes a ripple effect with everyone we know or come in contact with, & everyone they know & come in contact with, & so on... This movie shows this so well. I enjoyed watching it & recommend this to everyone! 10 out of 10