The Butterfly Effect

Why “The butterfly effect” is a great movie.
By: Federico Pardo López 1166908

‘The butterfly effect’, released in 2004 and directed by Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber is a great drama/thriller movie and not just because it have two fantastic actors in screen; Ashton Kutcher and Amy Smart. The butterfly effect is a movie that tells the story of a guy named Evan, who had a normal childhood and normal life, but not a normal destiny including his friends.

The story began when you can notice that Evan is in love with Kayleigh, a friend of his. They are really in love since they were kids, but Kayleigh’s brother Tommy wants them apart because he is a really jealous brother, and sometimes he has a mad and violent mind. Evan’s last friend is Lenny, a shy and manipulable person who is the noblest friend he would have in this movie. This is Evan’s gang.

One day, when those guys were teenagers, they decided to play with dynamite and explode something just for fun, of course this was Tommy’s plan. They put that dynamite in a tiny ‘house’ mailbox, but Evan suddenly appears in some seconds in the future. He just skipped the part when the dynamite exploded, but they were carrying Tommy who was in shocked because of something Evan couldn’t remember. This could appear like something insignificant, just like a tiny memory problem, but this memory is the beginning of all the problems that Evan will live. Because of this dynamite accident, Evan’s Mother took him to another place and tries to make their lives better.

Seven years later, when Evan was in Collage, you can see that he is studying psychology and he is the smartest of his class. Evan is a responsible and decisive person. For his memory problems, he have been told by the doctor that he has to write diaries to remember everything, so since he was a child he has wrote in his diaries every single day. When he got 7 years without forgetting things, he celebrated with some friends, including his date. Evan and his date went to his Collage room to have some privacy, accidentally the girl found one of Evan’s diaries when he was a kid, she asked him to read something, Evan accepted, when he was reading the first page he found, his room started to shake and in a mystery and strange way he appeared in the memory he was reading, but he noticed that it was not only a memory, he was living again that moment, the moment he and his friends were teenagers and were exploding the tiny ‘house’ mailbox, he accidentally burned himself with the cigarette he was smoking, then he appeared again in the future, in his room with his date, he saw the scar in his stomach. A new scar that was not there before.

He was really confused and he started to read a lot of his memories and see that he has the power to go back to the past and live it again. He visit his childhood street to see Amy, they just fought and one day before, Amy killed herself. So this is when Evan makes to himself the question the movie is based: “If I can make scars, do I have the power to heal them? What about Kayleigh’s scars?” Evan has a fantastic power but it could be also a course, he wanted to relive his past and fix his friends lives, but he just learn that he can modify their destinies, but not their lives and their decisions. This is a reflexive and many lives story, I think this is a great movie and not just for their effects, the way the story is written is amazing, and maybe it’s necessary watch it twice to understand it in a 100% way.