Review of The Butterfly Effect (2004) by M.k. — 20 Feb 2006

Wow, I never really paid an attention when this film was released. It seems critics hated this film with their hearts. For Ashton, it was one of his better performances. For Amy, it was decent. People mistake the concept of the film with time travel.

Yeah, I think it is part of it, but the film clearly states in the intro that it is about CHAOS theory. I think the Director's Cut's ending was much superiror than the theatical ending. I blame the studios.

Yeah, life changing alteration can be fun to watch, but some of the things were overly done. The film tried too hard to make everything change for each alteration. Although it was funny, Frat-life alteration was overly done.

It seems like they foreced it to happen. But I love the depth of psychological aspects of the film. The fact that blackouts in the film only happened in the events of "future" reconstruction.

It was left blank in the brain to fill it in later. Could you imagine multiple neural reconstruction of your brain for new memories? No one knows how will it be or how it could be, but this film did a pretty good job.

Ashton having the skull cracking pain for his reconstruction seems very reasonable. What will happen to your brain upon a complete input of all new memories with original memories residing in the brain? The beauty of memories will be gone and only co-exist as psuedo-reality.

I personally think a person will go insane with co-exiting of memories from exact time and location; thus this explains why everyone in Evan's family line appears insane. Just think about how crazy the director's cut's ending is.

This film is deep, but sugar coated with Hollywood's studio power, I'm just disappointed how so many critics didn't see the depth of deeper meanings this film was trying to reach. Yeah, it was little cliche here and there playing under typical Hollywood, but there is something other than the typical.