The Scream of the Butterfly

Rating: 7/10 (11 August 2004)

****SPOILERS**** The movie "Butterfly Effect" starts off like a deep psychological drama and then slowly turns into and finally in the last half of the film becomes a Sci-Fi adventure about time travel.
Young Evan Treborn, Ashton Kutcher, has been suffering severe black-outs all his life, a condition that put his father Jason, Callum Keith, in a mental institution. Being examined at the hospital for his black-outs the doctor suggests that Evan keep a journal, which is central to the story, about what happened every day to him in order to jog back his memory.
As Edan grows up and leaves for college the black-outs stop and for once in his life Edan becomes normal like everyone else. Involved in a college project about memory retention Evan dusts off his journals that he hasn't read for years and when he does read them the black-outs of his childhood begin to be filled in. Excited over this discovery Edan goes to see a childhood friend Larry,Elden Henson, who he hasn't seen for years to confirm if his new memories of the past are true or just imagined. To Edan's surprise from what he gets from Larry his visions are true but Larry unlike Edan wants to forgets about them. Edan's bringing them up depresses Larry so much that his mother tells Edan never to see or call Larry again.
Edan then goes back to the town where he lived as a little boy to see Kayley, Amy Smart,who is at first glad to see him but when Edan brings up the story about her and himself being forced to have sex and being taped by her sick and pedophile father George,Eric Stoltz, she becomes very upset. It may be new to Evan but Kayley had been trying to put that terrible event out of her mind for years and didn't want it brought up again. Still Edan is so obsessed about what Kayley's father did to her and himself that he doesn't notice or realize how it's hurting Kayley and later he finds out from her outraged brother Tommy, Willie Lee Scott, that Kayley killed herself.
After that movie turns from a drama about remembering past events to going back in time to change them. It's never fully explained, all Edan does is just look dates in his journal, just how but Edan somehow manages to go back in time and try to change events, that happened to him and his friends, for the better but instead they only become worse.
Edan goes back in time four times and in all those times that he changes the past the future is even bleaker that it was without the changes. Edan ends up killing Tommy and then put in jail where he's beaten and brutalized. He's responsible for having Larry kill Tommy which has Larry put away in a mental ward for the rest of his life and Keyley becomes a hooker and drug addict from the shock of seeing her brother Tommy killed as a young girl.
Edan loses both his arms in an explosion that leads his mother Andrea, Melona Waiters, who never touched tobacco, starts to chain-smoke and eventually dies of lung cancer at an early age. And on his last trip back in time Edan accidentally kills Kayley, by trying to stop her father from molesting her, when he's seven years-old and spends the rest of his life in a mental hospital.
Even though Edan's father has the same illness as Edan has we never see him go back in time. The end of the movie is a bit of a letdown with Edan putting Kayley out of his life forever when they both were seven years-old and thus not try to go back in time to correct the damage that her father, as well as himself by bringing it up, did to Kayley that led to her suicide.
As far as we know time travel may very well be possible in the future but the ability to change past events isn't. Changing the past for the better,if at all possible, is like a game of poker, you never know what hand you'll be dealt. If your able to change past events you can't know how those changes will effect the future and those effect can make the future far worse then it already is. Which is what Edan so sadly found out in the movie "The Butterfly Effect".