Butterfly Effect April 21st, 2010
Originally Written 02/02/04
Caught The Butterfly Effect on Friday night. I’d heard mixed and middling reviews on the film, but I was still curious about it and wanted to check it out. The movie definitely had its faults. It was easy to find plot holes and the characters were fairly two dimensional. Still, I found the premise interesting and I could overlook that. The method of time-travel was never explained, but I found I was able to suspend belief on that. So even with its faults, I enjoyed the movie and found it was better than I was expecting. It wasn’t high science-fiction, but it had a really good premise at its core.
They did a lot of fun things with the idea and I liked how the different realities played out. The film had fun showing how the characters changed drastically between the main characters jumps back in time to try and put things right. The film had an interesting idea of causality, which didn’t quite hold up if you analyzed it too much, but disregarding that, the premise it created was pretty neat. It was one of those films where I appreciated it more after watching it and kept on thinking things over. The ending was also satisfying too. It could’ve been darker, but they also didn’t use a typical Hollywood-ending cheat to make everything okay, there was some loss at the end, which made it work better. While there’s no burning need to see the film in the theaters, I would suggest giving it a try as a rental. It’s by no means perfect, but it tries hard and does tell an interesting tale. It’s a bit of light sci-fi that brings up some ideas which are fun to think about.
Incidentally, the title refers to the popular chaos theory explanation about a butterfly beating its wings in Central Park causing it to rain in Brazil. When we first saw the trailer for it we were wondering about it referencing the old Ray Bradbury story about the guy going back in time to the Jurassic era. He steps on a butterfly and when he returns to the present the world and all of history has been completely changed.