You know, just as I finished watching this film and googled it to check up on stuff like the date and actors, I found out the reviews for this film were pretty harsh. And I don't understand why. Ok, I admit it has some hiccups here and there but what movie doesn't? It is certainly beyond decent; pretty damn good if I say so myself. It isn't certainly the best film on the eponymous subject, since it just exploits it as a plot device rather than exploring, but it certailny isn't the worse either.
Probably every movie that deals with the subject of time travel EVER has featured the so called "Butterfly Effect", based on Chaos theory. In case you're not familiar with it (rewatch Jurassic Park right now), it states that small unpredicted events or changes in variables will eventually affect the results drastically. The film is entirely based around it: Ashton Kutcher plays Evan, a kid that suffers from a condition in which he blacks out and then wakes up with no memory of what just happened. As he grows up, Evan goes through several traumatic incidents, in particular:
- At age 7, He and his childhood sweetheart, Kayleigh, are forced into child porn by her father.
- At age 13, Kayleigh's sadistic brother, Tommy, forces Evan, Kayleigh and Lenny (a friend of Evan's), to blow up a neighbour's mailbox, accidentally killing a woman and her baby.
- Tommy kills Evan's dog after he starts dating his sister, after threatening Lenny not to do anything about it.
Props to Jesse James as Tommy, that was disturbingly believable.
Now in college, Evan discovers he can travel back in time to whenever he blacked out and change the events, altering his life. For instance, he goes back to the child porn bit and bullies Kayleigh's father into leaving her alone and disciplining Tommy, and he ends up dating her and becoming a frat boy. But everything has consequences, and Tommy ends up being abused by his father instead, leaving him psychotic and tries to kill Evan.
Thus, Evan changes the timeline again, this time asking Lenny to cut the rope holding his dog to make up for his guilt after killing the woman and the baby. He instead kills Tommy and is sent to a psychiatric institution, and Kayliegh becomes a whore... somehow. Every time he tries to change the past, everything still somehow messes up. The intricate timelines and overall plot are really clever and imaginative.
In another timeline Evan jumps into the mailbox... Yikes.
But the execution of these timelines isn't just as good. Some things, like the aforementioned whore thingy, doesn't really make a lot of sense. Plus, the consequences of Evan's time-travelling shenanigans are somewhat limited: they may severely change one character's life (Lenny goes from Kayliegh's boyfriend to a mental patient) but not the lives of the other characters. And they only seem to affect the four main characters (aside from Evan's mother in one timeline).
Aside those minor inconsistencies, the film has other problems. Ashton Kutcher's performance is pretty mediocre, and it is a shame because the rest of the acting is really good, particularly given all the different personalities the characters end up with. I have to give him credit for not, say, hyperventilating through the whole flick or going "oh, this can't be real" every five minutes, but I would have preferred other actor.
Derp! Jake Gyllenhaal is out, this film is too similar to Donnie Darko already.
In the end, I really, really liked this film, despite all its mistakes. Say what you want about being flung back and forward all the time with all the flashbacks, but I enjoyed it. If the mistakes in the plot were fixed and we didn't have the actor that ruined Two and a Half Men as the leading role (it wasn't that good of a show to begin with anyway), it would have been a fantastic film. Nonetheless, I highly recommend watching it.
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