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f13.net  |  f13.net General Forums  |  General Discussion  |  Topic: Movie Review: The Butterfly Effect 0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
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Author Topic: Movie Review: The Butterfly Effect  (Read 1330 times)
Paelos
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on: July 01, 2004, 07:55:06 AM

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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Reply #1 on: July 02, 2004, 07:30:53 AM

His attachment to her is part childhood love, but mostly an overwhealming guilt complex.  His mother took him out of that shithole town, away from the psycho brother of hers and her pedophile father.  He promised he would come back.  He never did.

During college he was studying his own blackouts and ended up going back to question his old girlfriend (I forget the full reason for the visit).  She gets very upset when he starts questioning about things that happened with her father.

This guilt is what drives him to go back and fix the pedophile incident.  He does so.  Then he is in an idyllic life sleeping with his hot chick childhood girlfriend.  This segment has an unknown duration, and I believe it is here where he really falls in love with her.  Then her brother gets out of prison and he kills her brother half in self defense, half in rage and goes to prison.

At this point the movie starts to fall apart.  He becomes selfish here and tries to escape his prison term instead of just waiting to see if he can get off on self defense.  The escape also makes no damn sense.  The hand spikes/jesus thing to get prisoner loyalty just does not work.  Every other time in the movie the flashbacks make a full rewrite of his past with anybody else around him having lived this NEW life and it all seeming normal to them.  If the movie wanted to hold continuity the scars on his hands would not have 'appeared' to the prison innmate.  instead when the main character came back the innmate would have said "So what?  You always had those scars"

Movie never fully recovers from it's decision to step off the logical tracks here.

I liked the movie overall though.  The blackouts don't happen for no reason IMO.  They were there because for some reason as a child he could not remember any time where he had been twice before.  Probably because his brain didn't know which set of events were the real ones.  I don't think he could return to the blackout times.  Instead he had the blackouts because those were times he would later return to.

The end of the movie throws more confusion on it though, in the revelation that some of those times never happened in the final timeline.

The movie had lots of holes.  No more than any other time travel movie I have ever seen though.  I understand not enjoying the brutality of the movie though.  It is a very dark psychological movie.  And can be hard to watch.

I would probably rate my viewing of it as a positive, but would have a hard time suggesting it to others.  For both the plotholes and how emotionally fucked up it is.
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