DVD Review: THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT

Now out on DVD:

THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT 

(Dir. Eric Bress & J. Mackye Gruber, 2004)

First let me get this out of the way, it's not that I find Ashton Kutcher to be an untalented actor. It's that I find him to be an obnoxiously untalented actor.

But that’s the least of our worries with this contrived derivative nonsense from the fellows who brought us the FINAL DESTINATION films. The plot is too ridiculous to go into at any length, so simply it's a story about a guy who travels back and forth through time to try and fix the circumstances surrounding a traumatic childhood incident so that the present day outcome is A-okay.

Kutcher, as a college student who suffers from migraine-like seizures, achieves this amazing feat somehow by concentration on reading old journals (I guess like Christopher Reeve used his mind to go back in time in SOMEWHERE IN TIME), and that’s just one of the hundreds of elements that don't work at all here. 

What really makes this so laughingly bad is how drastically this flick overshoots; it wants to be a cool cerebral movie like DONNIE DARKO, it wants to be a ‘love conquers all’ movie like WHEN DREAMS MAY COME, Hell, it even wants to be an episode of Oz at one point too!

The title refers to the standard chaos theory (also quoted by Jeff Goldblum in JURASSIC PARK) with the example of a butterfly gently flapping its wings in one part of the world, creating the potential for a monsoon somewhere else in the world, but that really has nothing to do with this story.

I mean, nothing in the world changes after the time warps except the lives of the microcosm of the handful of Kutcher’s friends. If he returned to the present to find that America had been taken over by some vast skinhead regime after a cold war attack in the ‘80s or some other world changing effect we might have something here. As such we've got nothing but yet another exercise in sci-fi stupidity.

Wish I could concentrate on my journal intensely enough to go back in time to not watch it.

Special Features: Longer Director's cut with deleted scenes and alternate ending incorporated, the featurettes “The Science and Psychology of the Chaos Theory” and “The History and Allure of Time Travel,” trailers, and Fact Track viewing option. 

More later…