Should have paid attention to Homer J.

Rating: Null/10 (12 April 2010)

Time travel films are nothing new – movies have featured them since before they could talk – and it is difficult for any movie-maker to inject something fresh into the genre. In fact, every kid who's seen that Simpsons' episode where Homer keeps travelling back in time with ever-increasingly catastrophic repercussions knows that messing with time can alter the world's time-line to a devastating degree. Anyway, co-writers/directors Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber obviously saw that episode too and, deciding to link it to the chaos theory that is so fashionable these days, have managed to fashion a story that is every bit as flawed as it is entertaining.
Ashton Kutcher is Evan Treborn, a hotshot university student with a fat goth room-mate and some serious childhood traumas that he has blocked from his memory. These include paedophilia at the hands of his childhood sweetheart Kayleigh's drunken kiddie-porn film-making dad, beatings from her brother, the murder of his dog, the accidental murder of a mother and baby and the unintentional incarceration of one of his friends in a mental home. Fact is, you can't blame him for wanting to forget, but a darker cause of Evan's childhood blackouts lay at the root of his problems. After unexpectedly travelling back in time while reading one of the childhood journals a psychiatrist encouraged him to write in hopes of recovering his memories, Evan discovers he has inherited a curse from his institutionalised father. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that another traumatic episode from Evan's childhood was his father's attempted murder of him. Anyway, after the suicide of his childhood sweetheart, Evan chooses to use his newly-found time-travelling skills to change events in the past in order to improve things in the present. Trouble is Evan never saw that Simpson's episode me and Eric and J. saw...
The problem with movies involving time travel is that even the most cursory thought given to their plot-line will uncover enough holes to make a very big fishing net. For example, there's a point in Terminator 2 where the death of a character should result in the Terminator himself never being invented. This is presumably overlooked or ignored by the makers. Personally, I think they willfully disregard such flaws in order to tell the story they want to tell, and the time-travel genre is the only one in which they are allowed to get away with it. Anyway, the trouble with The Butterfly Effect is that its writers never seem to even pause to consider the gaping holes they are leaving in their wake, so caught up are they in the fun they're having creating all these funky alternative futures for their hapless hero. And, man, do they have some futures mapped out for the poor guy: murderer, prison bitch, paraplegic, mental patient. You'd think after a couple of dips Evan would remove his toe from the water, but not our boy – he just dives in even further, causing ripples that create ever-worsening scenarios for him and his small group of friends (curiously, none of Evan's tinkering seems to affect the world in general – apart from his first attempt, which seems to lend a kind of 50s musical feel to contemporary university life). Evan blunders back and forth through time like a pinball, learning nothing as he goes to increasingly desperate lengths to put things right.
It has to be said that The Butterfly Effect is undeniably entertaining, I was reasonably absorbed in Evan's fate even as I reflected on the pedestrian script and acting. Amy Smart probably has the best role as the wretched Kayleigh, who travels the entire spectrum from university princess to scar-faced hooker courtesy of Evan, and she gives a decent account for herself. But, considering that she is the emotional focus of Evan's escapades, we are left curiously unconcerned by her ever-changing plight, as we are by the fates of Evan's friends and mother.
The version I saw was the UK DVD director's cut which, apparently, has a completely different ending to the cinema version. I can only speculate on how bad the cinema ending was, because the director's preferred ending is so stupendously ill-conceived that it completely overshadows any good work that might have gone before. It was so bad it had me swearing at the screen in disbelief.
(And unless you are really, really interested in finding out how amazing every single person who worked on the film was, give the directors' commentary the widest of berth.)