Paelos
Contributor
Posts: 27075
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As per usual on Wednesday nights with nothing better to do, and coupled with the fact that one of my roommates manages a Hollywood Video, we sat down to enjoy our weekly flick. This week it was the Butterfly effect, starring Ashton Kucher, that hot blonde from Road Trip, and the big fat bully from Boy Meets World. Suspending disbelief for a movie that proportedly messes with the space time continuum, I sat down with minimum expectations. Sadly, I had no idea what I was in for.
Let me start by saying that this movie is fucked up for the purpose of being fucked up, and it also lacks continuity of plot whatsoever. That is mainly due to the fact that the main character keeps trying to change the future by reliving his past, so the next scene makes the last one completely irrelevant in time. Only the main character knows that anything is different. However, its not just the disjointed feel of the movie that grates on the viewer, but moreso the grim circumstances surrounding the young Kucher who apparently has blackouts for no reason. We find out later that as an adult he can go back in time to these blackouts by rereading his journals that he wrote when he was younger. What he discovers are some twisted events that shaped his young girlfriend into a shell of human being.
We are forced to watch dynamite explosions killing people, dogs set on fire, prison bitch behavior, crackwhores, pedophiles making movies, and an endless stream of beatings and murders. Everytime Kucher delves back into the past, he seems to find a way to come out of it more fucked up than before. It's seemingly remanescent of the Simpson's Halloween episode where Homer's toaster sends him back to the stone age, thus changing the future whenever he steps on something. In his attempts to save his young girlfriend from an inevitable suicide, Kucher ends up dealing more collateral damage than Iraqi missle strikes.
The movie is not poorly acted, but the script is poorly written, and it is very hard to understand Kucher's motivations for wanting to continually save his young female friend. I blame this mostly on the fact that there is little more than a small kiss at a movie theatre early in his childhood to explain his attraction to this girl. Still, I was attracted to a few women when I was in 6th grade, but I didn't cross over the bounds of physics and mental health to keep death's hand from their door. The story is meant to be a psychological thriller that comes off flat due to the empty characters who change all to frequently to get a feel for their revlence in the movie. All in all, I'd say pass on this one unless you are in the mood for some random violence, and if you are, I'd recommend getting loaded and beating on the local hippies rather than watching this movie.
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