Review of The Butterfly Effect

Rating: 10/10 (1 October 2015)

The Butterfly Effect is psychological thriller starring Ashton Kutcher and Amy Smart and directed by Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber. It is an engaging film with well-constructed characters that you actually care about.
The film revolves around Evan Treborn (Ashton Kutcher), a twenty year old college student who came from a troubled past and his quest to fix his life and the lives of his friends when he discovers that he can travel back in time by reading his childhood journals. Evan's past is filled with traumatic events that shape not only his own future but the futures of his friends as well, however Evan can't remember most of those events due to his frequent blackouts. He primarily tries to fix the life of his childhood sweetheart Kayleigh Miller (Amy Smart). Despite his best efforts whenever he solves a major problem in one of his friends lives it causes a problem for someone else.
An excellent plot device used in The Butterfly Effect is Evan's blackouts. By keeping important parts of the story hidden it gets the audience involved by making you guess what happened until those events are later revealed when Evan goes back to change them. When he travels back in time and is able to piece together the events of his past it shows how dark his childhood really was.
One criticism of this film that I have is that Evan changing the past only seems to affect his friends and himself, the rest of the world is seemingly unchanged. That is really the only bad thing that I can say about this movie. I think that the fact that I can only think of one thing wrong with the film further proves how excellent this movie is.
The Butterfly Effect is a powerful film that is designed to hit you on an emotional level, it does this very well. It has well constructed characters that you actually care about what happens to them. Should you see this movie, the answer to that is most definitely yes.