This film did not deserve to end up in the trash bin.

Rating: 8/10 (28 January 2007)

I found the director's cut DVD of this amazing movie in a special deals bin -- the kind of place where the duds end up -- how undeserved that turned out to be! Coupled with a total lack of publicity in Europe (where complex stories and ambiguous endings are perhaps better appreciated) I think that a few heads need to roll in the marketing department.
The title attracted me. Of all the time travel stories I read, Ray Bradbury's story about the death of a single butterfly affecting life millions of years in the future is one of my favorites. Edward Lorenz might have known about the story or not when he coined the term "butterfly effect"... in any case the kind of butterfly effect that happens in the movie is Ray Bradbury's as much, if not more, than Lorenz's.
I just finished watching it and I must say that it's an excellent film. Much, much better than I expected. The story is good and wonderfully terse. The mystery is well paced. The acting, particularly the performance of the young actors and the two leads, is good. The humor is sensibly toned down in favor of the suspense.
From the start you are exposed to the main character's uncertainties and you follow him along his agonizing journey towards his inevitable ultimate conclusions. Evan's bewilderment and the way his friends react to him are shown quite well. The irony in the story is that the more Evan finds out about himself and the more he thinks he can change his destiny and the fates of his loved ones, the more things are slipping out of control.
Alternate universes give actors and actresses plenty of scope to portray their characters in different ways, and we get to see some fine performances here. Not only depicting what differing circumstances might do to their development, but also showing that they have a potentially happy and balanced person inside of them that only needs to seize the opportunity to come out.
It is a little over-simplistic to say that single events make or destroy a person's chance of a happy life. Minds are trapped more effectively by a bad combination of circumstances than a single circumstance, and modern society has many public servants trained to recognize children who are at risk. For the sake of the story, schoolteachers, health officials and police who might have saved the children from their traumas were all sleeping. In the real world they would be a little more astute, I am sure.
In other ways, once you suspend your disbelief in time travel, the action is very realistic and told in a refreshingly unadorned manner. Attention to many small details make viewing the movie several times a pleasurable experience.
This movie is a must-see for anyone who enjoyed the classic SF time travel stories. It is a time-travel story well told, mixing the butterfly effect, making changes in the past, and the frustration of not being able to do good.
For those who love the movie who haven't read the SF time travel classics -- you'll love them. Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder", the original Butterfly story. Isaac Asimov's "The End of Eternity", with its many plot twists. Poul Anderson wrote no less than three classics on time travel, "Time Patrol", "There Will Be Time" and "The Corridors Of Time", all very different. All these books were published in the fifties and early sixties.