Evan Treborn (Ashton Kutcher) has lost track of time. From an early age, crucial moments of his life have disappeared into a black hole of forgetting, his boyhood marred by a series of terrifying events he can’t remember. What remains is the ghost of memory and the broken lives around him – the lives of his childhood friends, Kayleigh (Amy Smart), Lenny (Elden Henson) and Tommy (William Lee Scott).
Throughout his childhood, Evan was under the care of a psychologist who encouraged him to keep a journal, detailing the events of his day-to-day life. Now in college, Evan reads from one of his journals and finds himself thrust suddenly, inexplicably back in time. He comes to realize that the notebooks he keeps under his bed are a vehicle by which he can return to the past and reclaim his memories. But these recollections only leave Evan feeling responsible for the damaged lives of his friends, most crucially that of Kayleigh, his childhood sweetheart who he continued to love into adulthood.
Determined to do something now that he was incapable of doing then, Evan purposely travels back in time, his present-day mind occupying his childhood body, in an attempt to re-write history and spare his friends and loved ones these traumatic experiences. By altering the events of the past, Evan hopes to transform the present.
But every time Evan changes something in the past, he returns to the present to find that his actions have unexpected and disastrous consequences. Try as he might, he can’t seem to create a reality that allows he and Kayleigh to live “happily ever after.”
The Butterfly Effect is a suspenseful, provocative thriller that represents an intriguing new direction for Ashton Kutcher (“That ‘70’s Show,” Dude Where’s My Car, Just Married) and features a dynamic ensemble cast that includes Amy Smart (Roadtrip, Varsity Blues), Eric Stoltz (Pulp Fiction, The Rules of Attraction), William Lee Scott (Pearl Harbor, Gone in Sixty Seconds), Elden Henson (The Mighty, She’s All That) and Logan Lerman, with Ethan Suplee and Melora Walters (Boogie Nights, Magnolia).
The film marks the feature directorial debut of Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, (the writing team behind the hit 2003 thriller Final Destination 2), who also penned the screenplay. A Benderspink and FilmEngine production in association with Katalyst, The Butterfly Effect is produced by Chris Bender, A.J. Dix, Anthony Rhulen and J.C. Spink. The executive producers are Toby Emmerich, Richard Brener, Cale Boyter, William Shively, David Krintzman, Jason Goldberg and Ashton Kutcher. The co-producer is Lisa Richardson.
New Line Cinema will release The Butterfly Effect (rated “R” by the M.P.A.A. for “violence, sexual content, language and brief drug use”) nationwide on
January 23rd, 2004.
(22 votes)
2.
Zhang Ziyi looks as beautiful as ever in Purple Butterfly, a film that takes her out of the martial-arts world of Hero and House of Flying Daggers. She plays a member of Purple Butterfly, an underground resistance group fighting against the Japanese aggression in early-1930s China. The movie's central dilemma comes when her ex-lover, a Japanese agent (Toru Nakamura), returns to Shanghai and is earmarked for assassination by Purple Butterfly. This compelling-sounding set-up is frustratingly unfulfilled, as director Ye Lou (Shuzou River) opts for an opaque brand of storytelling, in which chronology is jumbled and drama short-circuited. The film looks gorgeous, but it is close to impossible to understand what is going on at any given moment. If handsome images and dreamlike editing are enough, the movie might work for a very select group of patient viewers and Zhang Ziyi fanatics. --Robert Horton
(20 votes)
3.
A young man struggling to access sublimated childhood memories finds a technique that allows him to travel back to the past. Occupying his childhood body, he is able to change history. But every change he makes has unexpected consequences.
(19 votes)
4.
Despite box-office dominance during its opening weekend, The Butterfly Effect is better suited to guilty-pleasure viewing at home. When writer-directors Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber (who penned Final Destination 2) aren't breaking their own haphazard rules of logic, they're filling this sordid thriller with enough unpleasantness to make eternal damnation seem like an attractive alternative. In a role-reversal from his That '70s Show persona, Ashton Kutcher plays a college-age psychology student who discovers, by re-reading his childhood journals, that he can revisit his past and alter traumatic events, hoping to improve their previously unfortunate outcomes. Instead, this foolhardy experiment in chaos theory (the titular "butterfly effect," popularized by Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park) results in a variety of nightmarish permutations, each having dire consequences for him and/or his friends. This intriguing premise is explored with a few interesting twists and turns, but with subplots involving child pornography, animal cruelty, and profanely violent children, it's a stretch to call it entertainment. --Jeff Shannon
(19 votes)
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