Review of The Butterfly Effect (2004) by Jack P — 06 May 2011

Evan Treborn has come unstuck in time. As a young boy, he periodically experiences blackouts, after which he retains no memory of the intervening events. Mind you, in the catalogue of trauma that is the lives of Evan and his friends, itâ??s probably one of the less disturbing elements, but one that comes to have interesting consequences.

Grown up, sort of, he one day regresses and finds himself experiencing one of the incidents heâ??d blacked out. He finds, to his excitement, that whenever this occurs, he can take action to alter the events of the past, and by doing so, re-order his life and those of his friends and family in the present.

So he sets out to make everybodyâ??s lives perfect.

Now, Iâ??m sure almost everybody can think of some events in their past which theyâ??d like to change You wonder what would happen if youâ??d done a certain thing a different way. Maybe you convince yourself that something specifically desirable would have happened, if only youâ??d done that thing differently.

As a wise man once wrote, â??Of all sad words of tongue or pen the saddest are these: it might have been.â??

Unfortunately for Evan, it doesnâ??t quite work out that way for him. On the contrary, all his efforts to correct the wayward paths of his life end up causing trouble for someone.

Itâ??s a real shame,.

Mind you, it might be easier to sympathise with his plight if he didnâ??t continually behave like such an ass, or go about his life reprogramming in such a ham-fisted way.

And itâ??s not just that heâ??s clumsy about it. Heâ??s totally unreflective on the matter as well. What, the viewer may wonder, is he actually doing when he changes the past? Is he simply moving into a parallel universe where the alternate version of events is played out, leaving the original characters still to suffer through everything in a universe which he himself no longer experiences? If so, when you get right down to it, his efforts are not really saving anyone from anything, since thereâ??ll still be a version of them in some universe which will go through all the same issues.

Or is he really changing history, deleting a whole chain of events from reality to replace it with another chain â?? with no-one but him remembering that any other version ever existed?

The film doesnâ??t even attempt to tell us. And Evan himself never even considers any such questions. He just carries on making things worse and worse, until he comes to the revelation that it would be better for everyone around him if heâ??d never been born. And so, in an act which might, in the hands of other screenwriters or directors, have been one of heroic self-sacrifice, but which instead comes across as an act of petulant self-pity, he goes back in time to when he was still in the womb, and strangles himself with his umbilical cord.

In a way, this film is the antithesis of Itâ??s a Wonderful Life. In that film, George Bailey is persuaded against committing suicide by being shown how much worse things might be for those around him, had he not existed. Itâ??s a heart-warming and life-affirming tale intended to buttress the minds of its audience against despair and destructive self-recrimination.

The makers of the Butterfly Effect have a different agenda. What theyâ??re telling you is that it doesnâ??t matter what choices you make in life, youâ??re going to screw things up. Ultimately, it would be better for everyone if you werenâ??t around. So do us all a favour, and kill yourself, why donâ??t you?

Now, I donâ??t know about you, but Iâ??m sure that, in my own case, all of that is indeed true. However, being at heart a rather spiteful person, Iâ??ve decided to stay alive, just to annoy all my friends and acquaintances, whose lives would otherwise be so much better.

So, suck it!