Movie Review of The Butterfly Effect It’s not everyday that one may watch a film that can be categorized in all of the genres of drama, thriller, sci-fi, and love. However, in J. Mackye Gruber and Eric Bress’s movie, The Butterfly Effect, they do just that. Throughout the film, a young man, Evan T reborn, played by Ashton Kutcher, who like his institutionalized dad before him, has memory blackouts that he must deal with.
After several years had passed, Evan discovers a supernatural technique to alter his entire life and find his vanished and harrowing memories. Unfortunately, in order to relive these moments and recollections in his past, there are critical and severe consequences. To begin, Evan is born and raised in a small town with his hard- working, single mom. He begins to develop a strong friendship with the fellow neighborhood kids and continuously seems to find himself in some kind of trouble or mischief. On top of it all, Evan suffers from these harsh blackouts, finding himself in a whole other place. After these instances, he has no recollection of the occurrences, and thus, wakes up very confused.
Needless to say, neither his friends nor family played by Amy Smart and Eric Stoltz truly believe that these incidents are honestly happening. They figure it is his way of covering up and attempting to stay out of trouble. Ironically enough, Evan’s dearest friend, Kayliegh (Amy Smart) begins to grow depressed and violent after all of these situations that Evan has no control over. He yearns to help his friends, but it’s impossible when he can’t even remember these specific harrowing memories. As the years pass, he continues to have less and less black outs and eventually, they become a dark part of his past.
The Essay on Breath, Eyes, Memory
BREATH, EYES, MEMORY In the human experience, memory is essential for communicating, locating, and identifying people, places, events, and objects. Conversely, memory can be one’s enemy as past horrors are revived. The evocation of these past ghosts has the potential to incapacitate, drive to insanity, and kill an individual depending on the intensity and frequency of the memory. From early in ...
However, Evan devises a technique of traveling back in time to inhabit his childhood body and eventually causes irreparable damage. Evan keeps copious notes in a journal about everything he’s gone through before and after the incidents. He races back and forth throughout his own life, procuring his notebooks and re-reading them to hopefully fix things. After an eventful and oft tragic childhood, Evan starts looking for answers and becomes a college psyche major. In his attempts to work through his blackout illness, he discovers that his unique disability allows him to go back in time and relive those blacked out memories. Evan attempts to fill in every blank and re-capture those moments.
As he attempts to mend the broken lives of those closest to him from his childhood, he finds that every trip into the past brings chaotic results into the present, leading him to travel back again and again and causing irreversible damage. Though this occurrence is not necessarily believable, this one issue added to the sci-fi and creativity in the film Though I found several occurrences throughout the movie that weren’t realistic and believable, I thought that the main actors, Ashton Kutcher, Amy Smart, and Eric Stoltz, did an excellent job portraying these circumstances as realistic as they could. While Kutcher’s acting is better than expected, he does get a little melodramatic sometimes. It was interesting to see Kutcher apart from his usual goofy titles and characters. Their true theatrical abilities were revealed when all the main actors had to play and depict numerous and extremely diverse versions of their own characters throughout the film.
For instance, Amy Smart does an excellent job in acting the different versions of Kay leigh. From radiant beauty and happiness to street trash and gutter face. In addition, Kutcher’s character is also thrown into numerous different lifestyles in The Butterfly Effect. From a cocky fraternity boy to an armless handicap, then to a studious college student. Surprisingly, with the help of a great make-up crew and fantastic special effects, these changes happened in a smooth manner and we made easier to believe. The rapid flashbacks between scene changes and camera cuts in Evan’s blackouts and time travel as well as the extreme make-up in certain scenes intensified the entertainment and realism value of The Butterfly Effect.
The Essay on The Butterfly Effect Film Evan Time
"Butterfly Effect" was perhaps one of the best films I have ever seen. I found it mysterious, interesting and fascinating. I wanted to write my reaction paper about "Butterfly Effect" because of the similarity to the film we saw in class called "Donnie Darko." Both films investigate the issue of destiny thoroughly. Both film had a male character that has memories, dreams or black outs which make ...
In addition, the co-directors, Gruber and Bress did an excellent job in portraying the realism and theme found in this film. Throughout the film, the message portrayed to the viewer was to never take advantage of the time given to you. In addition, for every decision you make, there is always an outcome, good or bad. The viewer of the film may begin to feel attached to the characters, and often feel a piece of the character’s sorrow, happiness, or confusion throughout the film. Through these techniques, it was literally impossible to find myself anywhere but sitting on the edge of my seat.
It was difficult to predict what would come next, constant suspense was all around. Thus, making the situations portrayed more interesting and entertaining to the viewer of the film. However, due to Evan’s relapses to his past, The Butterfly Effect possessed several different story lines. I thought that the idea for this film was fantastic. However, the only problem I saw was that the concepts that were formed were poorly expressed. I was confused throughout the film on whether Evan had these blackouts because he is going back in time to cause them, or if he was going back in time because he had these blackouts.
I considered why these blackouts happen at those particular times. Needless to say, the story lines seemed to flow well together and by the end of The Butterfly Effect I thought it was worthy of note and an enjoyable film. Works Cited The Butterfly Effect. Dir. J. Mackye.
Perf. Ashton Kutcher, Amy Smart, and Eric Stoltz. DVD medium. 20 th Century Fox.
