The Butterfly Effect is a 2004 American science fiction thriller film written and directed by Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber. It stars Ashton Kutcher, Amy Smart, Eric Stoltz, William Lee Scott, Elden Henson, Logan Lerman, Ethan Suplee, and Melora Walters. The title refers to the butterfly effect. Kutcher plays 20-year-old college student Evan Treborn, who experiences blackouts and memory loss throughout his childhood. In his later 20s, Evan finds he can travel back in time to inhabit his former self during those periods of blackout, with his adult mind inhabiting his younger body. He attempts to change the present by changing his past behaviors and set things right for himself and his friends, but there are unintended consequences for all. The film draws heavily on flashbacks of the characters' lives at ages 7 and 13 and presents several alternative present-day outcomes as Evan attempts to change the past, before settling on an outcome. The film was released by New Line Cinema on January 23, 2004 and had a poor critical reception; however, it was a commercial success, generating box-office revenues of $96.8 million on a budget of $13 million. The film won the Pegasus Audience Award at the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival, and was nominated for Best Science Fiction Film at the Saturn Awards and Choice Movie: Thriller in the Teen Choice Awards, but lost to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, respectively.
Plot Growing up, Evan Treborn, his friends Lenny Kagan and Kayleigh Miller, and her brother Tommy suffered many severe psychological traumas that caused Evan to experience frequent amnesia. These traumas include being forced to create child pornography with Kayleigh by Tommy's father, George; Evan nearly being strangled to death by his institutionalized father Jason, before Jason is killed in front of him by guards; accidentally killing a mother and her infant daughter while playing with dynamite; and Tommy burning Evan's dog Crockett alive. Evan keeps meticulous journals of his day-to-day life as a coping mechanism. Some time later, while entertaining a girl in his college dorm room, Evan discovers that he can time-travel and redo parts of his past by reading his journals. His time-traveling episodes account for the frequent blackouts he experienced, since those are the moments when his older self occupied his consciousness. After a traumatized Kayleigh commits suicide, Evan travels back in time and prevents George from molesting her. He comes back to a reality where he and Kayleigh are a happy couple in college, but he discovers George ended up taking out all of his abusive tendencies on Tommy, who grew up to become even more violent and dangerous. When Evan is attacked by Tommy, he kills Tommy in self-defense and is imprisoned. There, he manages to time-travel once more after his mother brings him a journal during a visit. Upon returning, Evan stops Tommy from killing Crockett, but Lenny, relentlessly bullied by Tommy and mentally unstable following the dynamite incident, kills Tommy with a metal shard. Following Tommy's death, Evan wakes up in a new reality where Lenny has been institutionalized, and Kayleigh is a drug-addicted prostitute. Evan travels back to prevent the dynamite accident; while Tommy shields the mother and baby from the blast, Evan is caught directly in the explosion. In the new reality, Lenny and Kayleigh are happily in a relationship, and Tommy has become religious, but Evan is a double amputee. His mother, stricken with grief over her son's injuries, began smoking obsessively and developed lung cancer. To save his mother and himself from this fate, Evan goes back to his childhood and prepares to discard the lit dynamite, but Kayleigh picks it up when it is smacked out of his hand by her father, and it explodes, killing her. Evan awakens in a mental hospital and finds that his journals no longer exist, and he has suffered irreversible brain damage due to the rigors of time travel. He discovers that his father had the same ability before losing the photographs that allowed him to time-travel. Evan ultimately reasons that he and his friends will never have good futures as long as he keeps altering the past. After escaping the hospital staff and barricading himself in an office, Evan uses an old home movie to travel back to the day he first met Kayleigh. He intentionally upsets her so that she and Tommy choose to live with their mother rather than their father in the wake of their parents' divorce. As a result, the siblings are spared a destructive upbringing, and Lenny is never bullied and the dynamite incident never happens. Evan awakens in a college dorm room, where Lenny is his roommate. To ensure that his plan worked, he asks where Kayleigh is; Lenny does not know who Evan is referring to. Satisfied that his friends' futures are secure, Evan burns his journals and videos to avoid altering the past ever again. Eight years later, in New York City, Evan and Kayleigh pass each other on the street, briefly look at each other, and continue walking.
Director's cut ending With his brain terribly damaged and aware that he is committed to a psychiatric facility where he will lose access to his time travel ability, Evan makes a desperate attempt to change the timeline by watching a family video, which shows his mother just before she was about to give birth to him. He travels back to that moment and strangles himself in the womb with his umbilical cord so as to prevent the multi-generational curse from continuing, consistent with an added scene where a psychic palm reader tells Evan "you have no lifeline" and that he does "not belong to this world". Kayleigh is then seen as a child in the new timeline, having chosen to live with her mother instead of her father, and a montage suggests that the lives of the other childhood characters have become loving and less tragic.
Cast
Production
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