The Butterfly Effect: Director’s Cut

“Change One Thing, Change Everything”

The Butterfly Effect: The Director’s Cut follows the early life of Evan Treborn (Ashton Kutcher), his growing up in a small town with his single mother and his friends. He suffers memory blackouts, and then suddenly finds himself in a different place, bewildered and confused. His mother and other people around him think he is making it up to get out of trouble, as something always bad seems to happen once he regains consciousness. From the age of seven, he is ordered to write a diary as therapy, and to help him remember what happens during his blackouts.

After a quiet period, Treborn thinks he has grown out of his childhood blackout episodes. One day, while a psychology student at college, he re-reads some of the childhood entries from the diaries, and is suddenly experiencing what he thinks is a traumatic flashback to his younger days. Through trial and error, he works out his is actually time travelling, and sets out to fix and improve problems with his and other people’s lifes. He creates an interesting and mesmerising chain of events which are dark, twisting, and sometimes grotesque.

The subplots within The Butterfly Effect address issues such as paedophilia, mentally violent children, animal cruelty and pornography, each of which, Treborn tries to affect for the better.

The boldness and realism of the script, in conjunction with the fantasy/sci-fi aspect of the time travel, makes it compelling watching. You have to keep concentrating, and only towards the end does the story become clear. The entertainment aspect comes from the whole, not from the film’s single parts. In a somewhat unusual way., it’s a modern story of good, striving to get the upper hand over evil.

Ashton Kutcher couldn’t really have picked an opposing role as this, compared to his stint in That 70s Show. He plays his part well, although when he has the ‘wtf is going on?’ look on his face, it’s exactly the same face he did in his TV comedy when something funny had happened, so he needs to work on that a bit. That aside, especially if you’ve never seen That 70s Show, you won’t notice the characteral link between the two programmes.

The Butterfly Effect definitely shows these hard hitting subjects ‘as they are’, so therefore I’d say it isn’t one for the faint hearted, and if you can see it all for that it is, then you’ll be emotionally involved even after the final credits have disappeared up the screen.