You can't change who people are without destroying who they were.

I ended up really enjoying The Butterfly Effect. The movie takes too long to get wound up, we spend too much time with kids is crappy situations early on, and too long with the strange blackouts keeping us from important parts of the story.

That said, once the interesting parts of the plot finally get going they make use of all that extra exposition. At least they do in the directors cut ending, which I found to be significantly better then the theatrical cut (more on this later.) The thing I'm most impressed with is the movie stands up to some basic scrutiny. Sure, if you go dig deeper there are some holes and chicken-egg scenarios that pop up but I think all of those are debatable. I didn't notice any clear cut errors in what they did, which is no small feat when time travel type things are involved.

The acting was fine but unremarkable. I suppose you could claim Ashton Kutcher's performance was remarkable, but only because we all had exceeding low expectations of him doing dramatic work (raising quality by lowering expectations...) I've heard complaints that the whole thing was hard to follow, but I didn't really get that. My big problem was that we really weren't given enough information at the start of the movie to get invested. I felt kind of half attached to the movie until the interesting stuff started happening, and I could easily have just given up on it and been switched off by the time they started delivering on all that exposition.

But the ending, oh the ending. I am so glad I didn't see this in a theater. The director's cut ending is, for me, unquestionably better then the theatrical ending. Without getting into spoilers, the directors cut ending is much tighter to the overall story and is where we know the movie must go. It's the truly self sacrificial thing that the theatrical ending just half-asses to let the audience feel better about the experience. I think my overall outlook on the movie would have dropped from "I enjoyed it" to "eh, not so much" if that was the only ending I'd been presented with - and I certainly would have had some more logical quibbles with the whole thing.

Still want more?
Read the Archives!