Intensity	Stupidity:Nudity Ratio 7:3	Budget Big

A note of warning, I will be discussing the movie in detail, including the ending.

As probably everyone knows, the title of the movie is a reference to a Ray Bradbury short story "The Sound of Thunder" in which big game hunters travel back in time and despite careful planning by their guides kill a butterfly which changes the course of human events. It also references some early weather predicting attempts that predicted hurricanes in Florida as a result of a butterfly moving its wings in India. There are also echoes of Ursula K. Le Quin's book "The Lathe of Heaven". This book chronicles a physiologist's realization that one of his patients can change reality with his dreams, but his attempts to guide these dreams goes terribly wrong. With this literary and pseudo-scientific background, you would expect the movie to think highly of itself, and it does. The movie is unrelentingly dark and grim. A couple of early humorous moments are quickly squelched by Evan Treborn's (Aston Kutcher) dogged determination to set things right. However, as any college freshman learns, there is a big difference between referencing great works of literature and creating them.

So, what is right about the movie. Generally speaking the acting is very good. Amy Smart plays the many variations of her character, Kayleigh, convincingly. Kutcher only lapses into his Kelso character a couple of times, though by the second time I was pretty annoyed with the movie and so it bothered me more than it should have. Visually the movie is strong and the special effects money was well spent.

The storyline is that Evan suffered from blackouts as a child. We quickly learn that his father suffered from the same problem and ended up in an insane asylum (eventually we get to see his grandfather's death certificate and Evan realizes that he was insane as well). His mother is pretty worried and sends him to a doctor who takes lots of CAT scans and recommends keeping a journal. Evan does this but the blackouts continue and seem to be related to big events in his life. Eventually he and his mom move away. It is implied that his mom suspects that Evan and his friends were involved in the death of a woman and her infant. We jump forward seven years and Evan is in college and on a first name basis with his psychology teacher. He also keeps worms in his room to experiment on. After a night out celebrating that it has been seven years without a blackout, Evan brings back a girl to his apartment and offers her a beer. While he is searching through his dorm refrigerator (all two cubic feet of it which takes Evan about two minutes which should have warned me about the pacing of the movie), she rummages around his apartment and finds his journals and starts reading them. Finally Evan manages to find the beers and returns to the girl who insists that he reads her some entries. This sparks some memories and soon Evan is off to look up some old friends who shared some traumatic childhood moments with him. Now to be fair, Evan and his buddies had a tough time of it. It was not bad enough that Evan's mom was alone and that his dad was institutionalized, but his mom leaves him with his best friend's dad who is abusive both emotionally and sexually to his two children. Seven years later, the same group of friends find a stick of dynamite and accidentally cause the death of a mother and her infant. At this point Evan's mom moves him away and he grows up and goes to college.

Instead of having sex with the cute co-ed he brought home, Evan is motivated to look up his old friends. Grown up Kayleigh (Amy Smart) is pleased to see Evan at first and then put off by his not contacting her in seven years. Evan being the shining star of a psych major that he is completely skips the small talk and proceeds directly to the point of his visit; asking her if she remember her dad filming them having sex when they were six. Understandably Kayleigh becomes upset, yells a bit and then walks away and Evan lets her. I think this scene was put in to make sure you understand just how self-centered and stupid our hero is. After not even calling her in seven years, he catches her by surprise where she works and dredges up some serious childhood trauma and then walks away again. Soon after that, she kills herself, Evan figures out a way to go back to key moments in his past and starts trying to make things right.

Evan's first attempt to set things right results in he and Kayleigh being engaged and in college together, but he is "gasp" a frat boy and Kayleigh's brother Tommy has become a raging maniac. Tommy confronts the couple and starts beating the shit out of Evan with a bat. Kayleigh runs to the campus security phone and by the time she gets back Evan has gotten the bat from Tommy and hits him in the head killing him. We next see Evan in prison and we have a long, unnecessary frat boy in prison sequence.

I've got to admit that I can get bored with a movie pretty easily. When that happens, my mind tends to go over what exactly I have been watching and I start picking apart the logic of the movie. It is pretty easy to distract me, which is why I include a stupidity:nudity ratio in the movie rating. If something really stupid happens in a movie but it is immediately followed by nudity, I can be distracted. Had Evan been sentenced to a women's prison, I might not have noticed how stupid the movie was getting. I am willing to grant the main theme of the movie that Evan can return to the past by re-reading his journal entries, but as the mind numbingly boring prison scene went on, I was wondering how he managed to get put in prison at all. When you are attacked by someone fresh out of prison with a history of violent behavior and he initiates the attack, killing him in self defense is not going to result in first degree murder charges. Worst case here is manslaughter and any good attorney is going to get you a suspended sentence. As the sequence continued to drag on, I started thinking about the journal. There should be 13 years worth of journals, yet we only ever see two sets; the ones from when he was six and 13. The seven year's worth after the move are never mentioned. Then there are the blackouts. We only ever deal with four blackouts. His mom implies that there have been more and she gets him medical and physiological help for them, so we feel there must be more but we only deal with four. The final scene tells us that Evan could go back to anything written in the journal, but he focuses on only those four incidents.

Now imagine this. You are standing on the side of a road and a truck comes roaring around a corner, sees your buddy too late, puts the brakes on but hits and kills him. You have the ability to travel back in time, so you go back to the instant before your buddy gets hit. You start waving your hands and yelling to attract the attention of the truck driver, who then is looking at you and doesn't even hit the brakes this time. If you have any intelligence at all, you go back far enough before the incident to gently change the outcome so that instead of you and your buddy standing beside the road, you are sitting at the coffee shop having lattes. If a truck crashes through the wall of the shop and kills your buddy, then I'd give up, but the idea here is not wait until the last second. You have the ability to time travel, the key word being time.

And speaking of time, the prison sequence finally ends and Evan goes back to one of the blacks outs and changes things again and again for the worse. This time Kayleigh says that when her parents were divorced she was given the option of living with her mom or her dad. She decided to live with her dad because otherwise she would not be able to see Evan. Kayleigh would have been around five when this happened. This means that Kayleigh's mom lost the custody of her two children because 5-year-old Kayleigh had a crush on a boy. This scene combined with the scene of his mom mentioning two still births before he was born and a scene in which a fortune teller tries to read his palm but finds that he has no life line gave away the ending to me. Clearly Evan should never have been born. There is also a scene where Kayleigh and Evan are in the same shot and while Kayleigh is bathed in warm red light (life), Evan's lighting is gray and cyan(death). As the movie finally ends, Evan watches the home movie his dad was taking of his mom being wheeled into the delivery room. We then go in utero to watch the fetus start to strangle itself. The hospital staff manage to get an ultrasound going and one of them even declares "the baby is strangling itself" just in case you couldn't figure it out yourself from the two sets of visuals.

I know that this was supposed to be dramatic and sad, but I found it hilarious. Setting aside the fact that you would not be being wheeled to the delivery room unless the fetus was in the birth canal, there is the problem that you can't strangle yourself to death. You might be able to strangle yourself until you pass out at which point your arms would relax and you would release your grip. Then there is the problem that a fetus does not breath, it gets is oxygen supply from the umbilical cord. Had I been more emotionally invested in the movie, I might have gone along for the ride on this, but having lost interest in the movie and not much caring for Evan anyway this was too much to bear with a straight face. When it occurred to me that Evan Treborn is the anti-George Bailey (James Stewart's character in "It's a Wonderful Life"), I completely lost it. Finally I got a chuckle out of the movie imaging the destructive results if George (matter) and Evan (antimatter, anti-George) ever shook hands.

Plus Equals

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