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“The Butterfly Effect” Directed by Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber New Line Cinema

Taking a departure from Ashton Kutcher’s recent slew of romantic comedies, “The Butterfly Effect” is a brilliant sci-fi thriller that catches audiences off-guard, challenging them to think about the extent to which everyday decisions can affect the future of one’s life.

In “The Butterfly Effect,” Kutcher portrays a college student, Evan Treborn, who suffers from mysterious memory blackouts. When these blackouts occur, Evan suddenly tunes out for several minutes at a time, and the on-screen action cuts ahead to when he regains consciousness again, typically during a jarring event that is both disorienting and startling to the audience. No one can figure out why or how Evan has inherited this disease.

But that of course is not where the story ends. Once Evan’s childhood is established within the film, these blackouts are revealed and become his key to figuring out why these missing moments of time were blocked from his memory, and how he can use this knowledge to relive these moments and change his current circumstances.

The title of the film lends itself to a hypothesis of experimenter Edward Lorenz, who was the first to pose the question, “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” In other words, Lorenz’s hypothesis, based on the mathematical chaos theory, questions whether different outcomes of an event have a strong dependence on slight changes in initial conditions.

This definition of the butterfly effect, also displayed before the opening credits, creates the philosophical framework from which this suspenseful tale unfolds.

While the film may benefit from notable names in its cast and a major studio release, “The Butterfly Effect” is nevertheless a daring project that doesn’t fit the censored sterility often associated with studio films.

Instead, its plot development and storytelling almost mimic that of an independent film, unafraid to step into the realm of dark and controversial themes that – while commendable and exhilarating – may at the same time, inevitably keep more easily disturbed audiences from enjoying the movie. 

-CJ Yu