Review of The Butterfly Effect (2004) by Arny B — 01 May 2011

The Butterfly effect is a time travel thriller written and directed by J. Mackye Gruber and Eric Bress, and starring Ashton Kutcher. The movie's name is taken directly from the chaos theory, that basically says that whenever we apply any kind of change whatsoever into the initial conditions of a dynamic system, the end result will/could be totally different from what's expected. This is also the premise of the film, as Evan (Kutcher) has a supernatural way of reliving certain events in his childhood and alter them, completely changing the outcome (that is the rest of his life).

The movie certainly has an intriguing and original idea, the problem is that Gruber and Bress present a script that's so amateurishly written, that their story just doesn't follow its own rules and gets ridden with plotholes, contradictions and bad dialogue since almost the beggining.

To be fair, plotholes are almost bound to happen in time travel stories, the only way a script can go around it is by setting its own rules and follow them, but as I said before, this is where The Butterfly Effect fails. There are times in wich the movie just chooses to forget its own setting just to conveniently move the plot forward or add a "thrilling" scene into the mix. I could go on and write several examples of this, but then I would be spoiling it.

Another problem with the script is the dialogue. Whenever Evan returns to his adult life, the only way the scriptwriters found to let the audience know what has changed is the use of bad and convenient exposition. For example: if Evan went back to when he was 3 years old and changed everything by eating cake, then when he returned back to his adult self he would probably find someone that conveniently tells him "remember when you were 3 and ate cake? well you know, that made everyone the way they are now". This didn't actually happen in the movie, I'm just using it as an example of how bad the exposition is.

Besides having some big script problems, Kutcher is another weak link in the film. There are times in which he really tries to act, but then he suddenly returns into being just Ashton Kutcher again. His use of the same facial expression during the whole movie doesn't help either. His acting is the same no matter what situation he's in.

As I turned my brain off, and tried to just go with the movie and let it entertain me, I found myself in trouble, because I really could not let the problems go. They really took me out of the story. All in all, I just couldn't feel entertained by watching this.