FAN TAKEOVER FORUM!: The Butterfly Effect (2004)

This article was suggested by Domicile of Dread Patreon Damien Crawford.  Patreons at certain levels get the ability to assign essays and article to me on a quarterly basis.  To learn more and to sign up, go here.  You can also sponsor a film for me to watch and report on during the 2019 Halloween Horrorfest by making a one time donation here.

We all have triggers that connect us with past traumas.  Some of mine are child abuse, animal torture, and inappropriate/inaccurate depictions of mental health services.  This film involves all three...and it’s impossible for the film to work without these triggers being in place.  They’re inciting incidents that drive main character Evan (Ashton Kutcher) to continue on his journeys into his past even though things get grimmer and grimmer.

That being said, an assignment was given and the show must go on.

If I divorce my own hang-ups from the film itself--after all, it’s not the movie’s fault that there are some scenes that pull my memory strings in a way I don’t want a horror movie to pull them--I do think it’s pretty...problematic, very good looking and well-made film that needed to, ummmm, smile a little bit.

Here’s what I mean.  The film starts off very dark, with its implied depictions of child molestation, a scene where someone sets fire to the main character’s dog and a pretty ignorant depiction of a mental asylum in the first twenty minutes...and it remains dark as our hero mourns his lover’s suicide, murders his lover’s brother, goes to prison, has to deal with a version of his lover that has become a scarred junkie prostitute, becomes an amputee, tries to commit suicide himself, and so on.  There’s such a pall of despair and bleakness over this whole film that it desperately needs a moment of levity so the audience can breathe.  And given that this film features three actors who are capable of skating the line between darkness and light in Kutcher, Amy Smart (who deserved a much, much bigger career than she got) and Elden Hensen, it seems weird that writers/directors Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber don’t allow us even a brief second of relief from all the Truly Awful Things they parade in front of us.

....and yes, I know that there is the ‘frat boy’ sequence....but Bress and Gruber insinuate this unsettling feeling that both Evan and Kayleigh are lesser people during it, that they may even be monsters not as great as her brother, but pretty nasty as they are.

While I’m on the subject, I think one of the failings of the film is the muddiness of the script--which is pretty amazing given this is a time travel story that is told wholly chronologically.  There was a long stretch where I was convinced that the reveal would be that Evan was as much of a monster as Tommy is, and the weird undercurrent in that frat sequence serves to bolster this impression.  I found myself somewhat let down by the fact that what our directors were hinting at wasn’t so.  I wonder if I wouldn’t have had that misinterpretation if our writer/directors had given us a little more light in this almost two hours of darkness.

This is a well done film, and I can certainly see why this has a rather impressive cult following.  I have nothing against the cast (in addition to the three leads, the film is graced with the presence of Melora Walters as Evan’s mother and, as we all know, Melora Walters makes everything better).  I was actually pleasantly surprised at the acting of some of the people playing the cast’s younger selves--I was particularly impressed by John Patrick Amedori and especially Irina Gorovaia as the teenaged Evan and Kayleigh, who I could believe would grow into Kutcher and Smart.  It does not look like a film made for 13 million dollars (except for maybe that chintzy, too-small-for-its-own-good prison set).  I do not want my problems with some of the subject matters that trip my own traumas to prevent those of you who might like this to experience it.  If you think this is for you, you most likely will enjoy it.  I did not, as I think it could have been improved with a little more work and a greater reliance on a cast that had capabilities it did not take advantage of.

I suppose I should mention the ending.  I did watch all three, and I have to say the one they went with made the best of it.  The ‘happy ending’ seemed like a betrayal of the entire film’s message (that sometimes not getting what you want in the first place is the best thing for all concerned) and the infamous ‘baby ending’...while it sort of ends up in the same place thematically as the extant ending, the whole sequence in the hospital is played so seriously that it ends up being ludicrous rather than profound.

So The Butterfly Effect wasn’t for me.  It doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t be for you.  Use your discretion.

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