Bizarre, Bewildering, Disturbing - And Very Good!

Rating: 8/10 (10 February 2009)

Ashton Kutcher isn't really an actor who appeals to me, so I wasn't really expecting a lot from this movie, but I was pleasantly surprised. This is a very good movie - bizarre all the way through and sometimes bewildering, but still very good. Kutcher played the adult Evan Treborn, a troubled young man with a troubled background who has inherited from his father and grandfather some strange ability to move backward in time by focusing on memories recorded in his journal. Unfortunately, both his father and grandfather were considered insane, and people are beginning to suspect the same about Evan. Evan's goal in his time travel seems to be to save his friend Kayleigh (Amy Smart), whose life is devastated by her father's sexual abuse. Unfortunately, every time Evan goes back in time and makes a change that he thinks will help Kayleigh, things get worse, and eventually everything spirals totally out of control. As Evan keeps moving from one reality to another, you begin to lose track of reality yourself while you watch this and there is a point at which you start to think that none of this is real; that Evan really is simply insane.
Performances in this movie were pretty good - not outstanding, but good quality. There are a number of troubling and unsettling scenes in this (particularly the dog being set on fire - which thankfully we don't see through to the end) and it certainly isn't an easy movie to watch from an emotional point of view, but it is a compelling movie that never loses its hold. One criticism has to do with the title. "The Butterfly effect" was defined at the start of the movie as the theory that something as simple as the flapping of a butterfly's wings in one part of the world can cause a typhoon in another part of the world. I'm not sure about that, but the point of the theory is that simple things can cause big changes. OK - but it seemed to me that Evan wasn't going back in time to make minor changes. A minor change might be "before I walked home along Elm Street, now I'll walk along Maple Street." That's a minor change that could possibly have a big impact. But Evan went back in time to prevent Kayleigh from being molested, or to prevent a mother and baby from being killed. Surely these are not minor changes; they're substantive. The movie's end - the chance encounter between Evan and Kayleigh (who now doesn't know him) on the street - also was too cliché for me. Aside from those points, though, I truly enjoyed this movie. 8/10