Butter Me Up

For a while now, I've been deliberately avoiding the movie The Butterfly Effect. While it sounded possibly interesting on the face of it, it also sounded like it had a lot of potential to be just plain stupid. And with the main star being Ashton Kutcher, the latter scenario just seemed more likely than the former.

Lately, though, a few people (independently of one another) gave me cautious endorsements of the movie and suggested I might want to check it out. The sort of consensus seemed to be "it's not great, but it's better than you probably think it is." And it finally all wore me down enough to give the movie a try.

That group consensus was basically right on the money. The movie is not great, but it was better than I thought it would be. If you don't know the premise, it's the story of a kid who experiences blackouts as he's growing up. Critical moments of his life, he "skips over" and can't remember what happened to him. But he does get past them and ultimately... well, grows up into Ashton Kutcher. At this point, he discovers that he has the ability to send his consciousness back in time to the moments of those childhood blackouts. At first, it just seems a vehicle to recover his lost memories. But soon, he finds out that he can change his present reality by the actions he takes when he travels back to the past. But the changes he tries to make for the better have unexpected and unfortunate consequences.

I spend a lot of time detailing the plot because that's the real meat of this movie. You might argue about how successfully it's executed, but the core idea of this movie is actually pretty cool. Sure, we've all heard the "butterfly flaps its wings halfway around the world" saying before, but this movie has a very interesting way of treating that. The idea of the blackouts as focus points at which to affect major change is solid, and it's often clever to see later in the movie what sorts of actions by the "future protagonist" explain the situations we found "past protagonist" wake up in after his blackouts in the first act.

I was also a fan of the ending -- but I should specify that I watched the "Director's Cut," which as I understand has a significantly altered ending from the theatrical version. this ending skirts right up against the line of "oh, come on!" But at the same time, it ends the story in the only real way I feel it could end. (I don't really care to see the theatrical ending now.) I really can't explain any more without giving anything away to those who haven't seen it, so I'll just leave it there. Bottom line, this script is a strong piece of writing. There's good craftsmanship there that the writer in me appreciates.

And yet, at the same time, the script is far from perfect. Some of the particular scenes hit the "unexpected consequences" element a little too on the nose. A lot of the dialogue is silly. Many of the characters are pretty cardboard. In short, the same effort that went into crafting the plot was not put into the other aspects of the writing.

The performances, by and large, are neither great not bad -- though if you count Ashton Kutcher as being a good actor for only occasionally coming off like Ashton Kutcher, then I suppose you'd have to say he was pretty good.

I suppose overall, this is movie with a few really fantastic elements... and the rest of which falls far short. It makes me wish that more care had been taken with the movie; I think it maybe had the potential to have been a real modern sci-fi classic, a Dark City or Gattaca or such. As it is, it's a long way from such a masterpiece, but still probably worth seeing. I rate it a B-.