The Butterfly Effect

On Monday night, technically it was Tuesday morning, I watched an awesome film as per the name of this post. A kid grows up with quite a violent childhood but suffers from black outs where he can’t remember anything that has happened, usually at traumatic times.

He grows up and goes to college (that’s American college so in reality its University!), and his thesis is on memory. Well since an incident a long time ago he has been keeping a journal of his life and while reading a bit he finds himself reliving a blacked out memory. 

The kids dad was a nut case, and one of the scenes of his growing up was going to see his dad. There is a black out in the middle of this scene which jumped to his dad trying to kill him. After his flash back the kid (can you tell I’ve forgotten his name yet?) talks to his mum about his memories and it turns out his dad had found a way to…???

It turns he can go back in time to these black outs and change the past. The result is the rewriting of the future, and huge nose bleeds as his brain struggles to store years of new memories in a few seconds. But each time he goes back to try and fix some of the horrific parts of his childhood other new bad experiences happen to him or his childhood friends.

In time each of the blackouts from the earlier part of the movie get played out in his time travelling stunts, sometimes more than once and he ends up in a future where he didn’t make his journals, the reading of which is what sends him backwards, and in a mental institution.

The main focus of his attempts to fix things was his best friend as a child who had suffered from her sick fathers attentions. It turns out that when her parents split up she decided to stay with the dad who she hated because if her & her brother had gone with their mother she would never have seen the main character again.

So to the end of the film, where he has to watch an old home movie of when he met this girl, no journals in this reality, and he goes back in time again and rather than being nice so they become friends he tells her to never come near him or he will kill her mother. She then chooses to go with her mother when the parent split and time moves forwards where they didn’t know each other.

Years later they walk past each other in the street and both stop, he of course has memories of the various histories from 8 years ago, she only met him as a child. She turns to look at him and then turns away just before he looks back. Both then walk away.

The film was one of those that left me wheeling just sort of thinking WOW at the end, it is now very much on the list of films I need to have in my collection.

Wisp