Beautiful Fantastic Effect!. Review on The Butterfly Effect Movie

Do you think it would be able to alter your future?

Would that be for your better?

How would it affect those associated with you?

The Butterfly Effect, first described by Lorenz at a December 1972 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., vividly illustrates the essential idea of ``Chaos Theory''. In a 1963 paper for the New York Academy of Sciences, Lorenz had quoted an unnamed meteorologist's assertion: If Chaos Theory were true, a single flap of a single seagull's wings would be enough to change the course of all future weather systems on the earth. By the time of the 1972 meeting, he had examined and refined that idea for his talk, ``Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas?'' The example of such a small system as a butterfly being responsible for creating such a large and distant system as a tornado in Texas illustrates the impossibility of making predictions for complex systems; despite the fact that these are determined by underlying conditions, precisely what those conditions are can never be sufficiently articulated to allow long-range predictions.

Evan Treborn (brilliantly played by Ashton Kutcher) is afflicted with problem of black outs, that mostly seem to occur during several painful episodes in his childhood - the same problem that had severely troubled his father as well and had resulted in his fettered existence (because of his dangerous disposition) in a mental asylum. As possibly a sort of remedy, Evan (as a child) is suggested by his psychologist to maintain diary records of daily events.

Nonetheless; a paedophilic abuse in the family of his best friend, a school boyish prank that goes terribly wrong, and his institutionalised father - the first meeting with whom almost results into a bizarre murder attempt (the ultimate consequences of all of which Evan is, however, still unaware of, because the blackouts that accompany him occur just at the right moment); put an overall detrimental effect on his growth which forces his concerned mother (Melora Walters) to change town. It seems to restore his equilibrium amicably and just when his troubled past is seemingly well and truly behind him, at the age twenty, seven years to the day after his blackouts ceased............

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he discovers that he can use his diaries to trigger a return to the past where his adult self - inhabited in his childhood body - can erase/modify certain events. Unfortunately, he finds that every trip back in time yields either an unintended result on his current self or some disastorous consequences for his family and/or friends (especially for Kayleigh (played by Amy Smart), the young woman he has loved since they were children), forcing him to travel back again and again. And in this effort to exorcise his personal demons and/or emancipate his/others' past wrongdoings, he discovers that even the tiniest alteration to the past can have gravely unpredictable consequences for the present.... cause he only seems to make it all go worse!

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''The Butterfly Effect'', or more technically the ''sensitive dependence on initial conditions'', is the essence of chaos and of course, the movie too. The movie weaves a highly nonlinear plot (I know, I know... the same might hold for my review as well... but like the movie, it was well intended :-D). About the cast, Ashton Kutcher does a fantastic job, even though he is relatively a newbie to such dramatic screen roles. Amy Smart; playing incarnations ranging from a normal sorority girl to an unwholesome scar-faced prostitute while William Lee Scott, Kayleigh's brother Tommy going from an egregious neurotic badboy to a true peace-loving christian; complement Kutcher pretty well. To summarise, the whole cast does a wonderful job to hook you onto an intricately plotted time-travel psychodrama.

Basically... two hours later, you definitely have something to ponder about!

-nitin