This is a 2004 thriller written and directed by the team of Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, and I liked it quite a bit.
Our protaganist is a successful college student (Ashton Kutcher) who's had an unusually traumatic life. I mean, like a LOT of bad stuff happened to him. So as a child, he developed a tendency to experience blackouts under stress. One blackout led him to a helpful pyschologist who suggested he keep a journal of his life, and he's done so ever since. He's made it to college and he's OK. He meets a woman (Amy Smart) he knew as a girl, and she's very much NOT OK.
Kutcher discovers he can travel in time by concentrating on his journals, casting his adult self into his childhood body. So he decides to go back, find the moment when poor Amy's life went sour, and fix it. But as the title implies, it's perhaps not possible to fix one thing without breaking something else. Therein lies the story, and by the end, the final fix really had me by the short hairs, even though there was a sort of inevitability to it.
When a film grabs me in some way, I often pay a visit to Rotten Tomatoes to see what the critics thought, and every now and then I find I'm very much out of the mainstream. That happened here -- most of the pros trashed this one.
But I think it's worth a look. I've never seen Ashton Kutcher in anything else, so I don't have an issue with him. And yes, it's violent, but not in an up close and personal way. And I suppose its story is also implausible. But hey, we're talking time travel, here! It maintains its inner logic just fine, and I think talking about whether time travel is possible is sort of missing the point.
At least one of the big boys agreed with me, and if you like you can read Michael O'Sullivan's review in the Washington Post.
5 comments:
Did you see the trailer before seeing the film?
An interesting topic for discussion is:
Have you ever seen a trailer you hated, and subsequently saw and liked the film?
Case Study: The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
The trailer repelled me. Seemed lame and clumsy. I love Anderson's films, and without seeing the trailer, I would have immediately seen this film.
Has anyone seen and liked the film? Because I am unlikely to view it according to Ken's Twelfth Law: A Film is Never Better Than Its Trailer.
Note that a filmmaker probably doesn't have much control over a trailer, so, in theory, a bad trailer may not be necessarily evidence of a bad film. But until I hear counter-examples, I'm staying clear of films if I don't like their trailers.
And, to get back to the subject, the trailer for this film turned me off. It seemed gimmicky and brutal -- or aimed at an audience which would respond to gimmicks and brutality. It did not seem to be in the 'literature of ideas' genre.
And, by the way, is this a Good or Recommended Film [in units of Rolston, *** or ****]? I'm kind of interested, since I plan to go back and rate my netflix films using this scheme.
I can imagine the film being Good instead of Bad.
"Recommended" would surprise me, but making allowances for the particularities of taste and personal response, I might be interested.
"Must See" would flabbergast me.
...for example, Minority Report is a movie about time travel. It is Bad, with a few Redeeming Features. The ideas are pedestrian, with a few flashes of visual and emotional substance [like the shot of the two heads facing outwards like Janus]. The plot always does what a Hollywood plot does, which makes me drowsy, and the only places it works is where the cinematographer has captured characters and light in a striking and moving way like a photographer can.
Not sure about the protocol for responding to questions posed within a commment, but I can't leave them unanswered...
I did see the trailer for The Butterfly Effect, and liked it well enough to remember the title. I don't remember the trailer.
I probably agree with Rolston's 12th law. I remember a New York Times interview I read over 25 years ago, with a director who had just done his first significant feature. He'd been working as an editor of trailers before that, and in the interview said he knew he could always find two good minutes in the worst pile of crap, until he got around to cutting his own trailer. Then he was asking himself "what was that guy thinking!?" The film was The Hand (1981), and the IMDB tells me this director was none other than Oliver Stone.
As to whether The Butterfly Effect is Bad, Good, Recommended or Must See, I'd say it's Good on its own merits, and Recommended for Time Travel fans.
I was also disappointed in Minority Report, considering its pedigree (Philip K. Dick and Steven Speilburg). I had to finish it on a second night, having literally dozed off in the second act.
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