Not what you'd expect ... and all the better for it

Rating: 7/10 (21 September 2004)

This thoughtful, downbeat tale of time travel and temporal meddling gives Ashton Kutcher the chance to show there's more in his bag of tricks than the underwhelming Dude, Where's My Car? He plays Evan, a young man whose youth has been punctuated by alarming blackouts and whose life and those of his closest friends have been blighted by several key incidents in childhood. Taking refuge in his diaries, he finds he can project his mind back into his younger self at the very point of each blackout and so alter the course of events. The Butterfly Effect is a parable of chaos physics which suggests, through the example of a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the world causing hurricanes on the other, that tiny and seemingly trivial events can have huge and unforeseeable consequences. Sadly, Evan's evidently not much of a reader and each of his well-intentioned interventions shifts the path of his life into disturbing and dark new territory, spurring him to go ever-further back in the hope of rectifying the new wrongs he's introduced. Directors/writers Eric Bress and J Mackye Gruber explore a lot of the interesting possibilities and conundrums of time travel and merit respect for keeping the tone of their film sombre and adult  this is most definitely not a world in which a little Back To The Future tinkering can result in everything coming up roses  while eliciting first-rate performances from a committed cast, including Amy Smart and Eric Stoltz.