The Butterfly Effect

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, now 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 a final outcome.

The film had a poor critical reception; however, it was a commercial success, generating box-office revenues of $96 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, another film from New Line Cinema, respectively.

Growing up, Evan Treborn, his friends Lenny Kagan and Kayleigh Miller, and Kayleigh's 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 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.