“”Another January, and another film starring Ashton Kutcher has arrived. One can suppose this will be an annual thing, with last year’s “”Just Married””, and the first month 2004 bringing “”The Butterfly Effect””. This being in addition to his ‘cover guy’ image, and his TV roles where he affects his ‘hip’ image.
Anyway, enough of that—the latest film from Mr. “”Punk’d”” is “”The Butterfly Effect””, a time-travel story, of sorts, and one where, if nothing else, the star attempts to move beyond his usual, hip image. The title of the movie refers to the chaos theory, which gives an example of how a butterfly fluttering its wings in one part of the world can cause a tornado in another. In other words, every event, no matter how small, makes an impact and can have far reaching effects.This is an interesting theory, and it would be great to see a film deal with this topic. Unfortunately, “”The Butterfly Effect”” does not deal with this—it does concern how the past impacts the future, but only for a group of friends. There are no larger alterations beyond this small inner circle.The story revolves around Evan Treborn (played at different stages of his life–in order–by Logan Lerman, then John Patrick Amedori, then Kutcher), and his seriously messed up life. Whether it is his dad who is locked away due to mental problems, or his friends’ pedophile father (Eric Stolz) who likes taking, um, interesting home movies, or his pal Tommy (in order–Cameron Bright, Jesse James, and William Lee Scott respectively) who has psychotic tendencies. Finally, and most significantly, Evan suffers from periodic blackouts whereby he can’t recall what just happened—and these mental outages always occur during supposedly negative experiences, resulting in a therapist’s suggestion that the kid write daily journals. Despite these problems, Evan tries to have an enjoyable youth with friends Tommy, Tommy’s sister Kayleigh (again..in order–Sarah Widdows, Irene Gorovoia, and Amy Smart), and Lenny (Kenny Schmidt and Elden Hensen, respectively). Unfortunately, not only do the blackouts continue, but in his early teens a pair of seriously messed up events occur, both involving his friends–especially Tommy–and so he and his mother (Melora Walters) move away from their upstate NY town. As he leaves, Evan looks toward Kayleigh–with whom he had developed a more romantic relationship–and flashes a sign indicating he’ll be back for her. The flick then flash forwards to when Evan is in college and pursuing an interest in psychology — especially in regard to the matter of repressed memories (hmmm…wonder why that issue). After a night out with his goth roommate Thumper (Ethan Suplee), Evan comes back to the room with a coed, who starts going through his old journals. She makes him read from one of these notebooks, and in doing so he discovers that through concentrating on certain moments from his childhood–i.e. the ‘blackout’ moments, he can literally go back in time to that event, occupying his younger self. At first Evan is not sure how to use this ability, and he tries to seek out Lenny (Hensen) and Kayleigh (Smart) to find clues to his past. This quest only brings negative consequences, and so the film’s protagonist heads to his diaries to travel back in time to fix matters. Every time Evan tinkers with the past, something radically changes for him and his friends in the present, from their personalities or even something simple as he and Thumper switching sides of their dorm room; unfortunately, many of these changes make things worse. [pagebreak]Another result of these temporal incursions is that Evan suffers some form of hemorrhaging, or at least some serious nose bleeds, which is coupled with a flood of memories from all the years of changed history. It seems like he never absorbs these memories as college-aged Treborn makes decisions based on the previous timeline