Evan (Ashton Kutcher) had a tough childhood. He was raised by his mother Andrea and never even met his father Jason, who has been committed to a mental institution Evan's whole life. He was part of a tightly-knit group of friends - Lenny, and the twins Tommy and Kayleigh - who fell apart after some catastrophic events occurred, but these same events also caused Andrea to move them both out of town. Evan doesn't remember any of this, though. Since he was 7 he has been plagues with moments of his life he just doesn't have memory of; moments he calls "black-outs". Since his first couple, he was advised to keep a journal of every day of his life to see if it helps jog his memory. He keeps these daily logs religiously even into college. This is when he discovers that reading these journal entries allows him to revisit these blacked-out memories. He then realizes he can make life better by changing these events.Things don't go as planned.
I love this movie. Apart from it being an eye-opener for me, it's simply a good movie. The story takes the concept of time travel and puts a twist on it with elements of hereditary psychology. You get to see how changing the past can both positively and negatively effect the present.
The cast for this movie had a lot of nobodies at the time, some of who became people of interest. The acting is pretty solid, including the numerous kids in the movie. There's one scene where Logan Lerman keeps looking off camera because he forgot his lines, but the kid was 10 when the scene was filmed, and he used some pretty big and scary words for a 10 year old. He always seemed to get "fuck bag" right, though.
Elden Henson knocks it out of the park here. I read that he actually filmed his normal scenes earlier in the filming process, then took a month off so he could gain a bunch of weight for the "crazy" scenes. The idea here being that he was supposed to be heavier when he was crazy, and appear healthy when his mind was healthy. The directors didn't expect him to accomplish this, but he did. He proved 12 years ago that he could act, and it took 10 years before he was cast in a movie ("Mockinjay: Part I", we'll cover the whole series) where he could actually instead of just being a "Bash Brother" (Unfortunately we don't have "The Mighty Ducks", and this makes me sad). I'm not sure if he was just taking a break from acting for a bit except for the occasional role, or if he was having a hard time getting roles.
Probably one of the weakest performances comes from Amy Smart, which is unfortunate because she's usually pretty decent. One casting choice was way off, and that was having Kevin Durand playing Carlos the latino inmate that Evan befriends during his time in prison. Aren't there plenty of latino actors out there who could have played him instead? It's a problem Hollywood still has to this day.
There are some super dark moments to "The Butterfly Effect". Early in the movie we witness Tommy and Kayleigh's father filming seven year old Evan and Kayleigh in a child porno. At age thirteen, the kids blow up a mother and her infant with a stick of dynamite in the mailbox, which puts Lenny in a mental hospital for a few weeks. The day Lenny's released, Tommy kills Evan's dog and severely cripples Lenny's mental state. During a revisit to the dynamite memory, Evan gets his arms blown off. On a revisit to the day of the dog being killed, Lenny kills Tommy after Evan is able to talk him down.
There are two endings to this movie: the Theatrical Ending and the right ending. In the theatrical ending, Evan solves all his future issues by telling Kayleigh on the first day they meet that he never wants to see her ever again. Weak, right? In the Right Ending (labelled as the "Director's Cut" for some reason instead of just "Watch this version"), we see Evan go back to the moment of his birth and strangle himself with the umbilical cord. Everything that happens in the movie leads up to Evan killing himself: the psychic saying he has no soul, Andrea saying she had three stillbirths before him (which is intriguing because THREE other people may have gone through this exact same situation and realization as Evan), and Jason saying "It has to end with me". Jason had gone through life with these cursed powers, and it's implied that Jason's father did as well.
The make-up department did a really tremendous job throughout. They needed to capture four different adult actors as four or five different people throughout the movie, and accomplished it so it didn't look cheesy. That isn't an easy task.
I think at this point it's clear how I feel about this movie. Check it out. Be ready for some dark moments (I want you all to know that I really had to hold myself back from having that last sentence read "Be ready for The Darkness", and then linking 'The Darkness' to a Youtube of "I Believe in a Thing Called Love."). But check this out. Don't let Ashton Kutcher scare you away, he actually did a tremendous job. And this was mid-2000's Kutcher, nearing the height of his douche-bagery. There were even a few "Kelso" moments, if you're a fan of "That 70's Show".
Like with many movies we cover here, there were a pair of sequels. I've never seen them, and have no interest in seeing them.
No comments:
Post a Comment