.. ludicrous Butterfly Effect. by Michael Agger - Slate Magazine:
The movie starts with a quote about chaos theory, as if that would explain anything. The gist of the "butterfly effect" seems to be: If you change one little thing, a lot of unexpected stuff might happen.
yeah it's mostly this quote & the title that I get a little stuck on. bcs 1) he does not change 'one little thing' he changes major obviously life-changing things and 2) the repercussions are pretty direct -if anything the problem is that he does not control the way he changes it (he wants his friend to cut the bag & set the dog free but instead that friend kills the other guy, and the corresponding future follows pretty linearly from that)- the wider world is actually not shown to be impacted in unpredictable ways
anyway drop reference to the butterfly effect & I'm cool, it was entertaining. though based on Lucky Sleven I imagine I'd have preferred Josh Hartnett. anyway I got interested when he comes to as a frat boy, that sort of intrigued me. huh. the outsider finds himself the insider he despises.
There are few golden rules to be gleaned from the movies, but let me propose the following: Don't, under any circumstances, fuck with time. Should you acquire the ability to speed it up, slow it down, or travel around in it, just stay put and watch reruns on the couch. hehee watch reruns instead of causing reruns or sth.
and this writer means that is what the movies teach you, which, okay right. but also seems to apply to movie-making. don't mess with time, you can't win. you cannot make it make sense. when i see a movie or read a book with time travel, there's always maddening irritants of this sort- rottentomatoes forums - It's all good but there's one flaw?:
-If you look at the drawing, it was specifically of the prison scene we see later in the movie. The aryan brotherhood dudes attacking him, one even had blonde hair, it shows them getting stabbed, etc. hmm, cool. also explains what ebert complained about: the unmentioned maturity of his drawing skill. anyway this is an aspect of the time-mucking that I think is interesting here and not common: young Evan's blackouts actually are when future Evan has taken over. like, young Evan finds himself holding a knife and doesn't know why - we see it is because future Evan gets the knife in plans to destroy the explosive. but of course this gets all tricky because it's like all the time frames and alternate happenings coexist. making for problems like... The problem is that when Mom picks Evan up from school, they discuss the drawing, but make no mention of him sticking his hands in those metal spikes. If the drawing exists, then the injury to his hands also must exist since they were from the same incident. right. and:
-In the jail Ashton goes back in time to injure his hands to prove what he's saying is true to his cellmate. He proves this by showing his scars BUT if that had happened in the past (because of the change)he would always have had those scars. So when he showed them to his cellmate, although Ashton would have known they had not been there before, for his cellmate they would always have been there ever sice he'd known him!
right and ok that seems like a 'flaw' that can be pointed out and called wrong. but without thinking myself into it I know I have at other times come to the conclusion that a good argument against the possibility of time travel is that there are resulting 'flaws' that cannot be made right. it just does not work.
though... Charlotte Sometimes came the closest to a believable, sensitive portrayal of it. so sad, Charlotte crying on the track for the girl who in any normal world she could never have known ... and there it is, a rule that makes things perhaps workable: Clare could only exist in the future (switching places with Charlotte) on the condition that she did not live into that future - she dies before growing into the adult Clare who would have lived in that day. you can't have two Clares at once.
always bothered me in Back to the Future - MJFox seeing himself running around the van (the end of the first Back to the Future I think) - because, as the philosophers would say, why does he get to be this instance of himself rather than that one? no, it won't work to be a self that sees yourself but isn't living it. no no no.
Ashton revisits the past and acts differently during the aforementioned tragic situations. When he returns to the present, all the new memories of his altered life come rushing into his head, an event we see on screen as a rapid montage of photographs. (Why didn't this happen to Michael J. Fox at the end of Back to the Future?) right he's all Mom!? Dad?? what!?
These episodes provide plenty of out-of-nowhere violence, but they also appear to be misguided attempts to have Ashton show his range as an actor. Every time he wakes up, he's in a different genre. There is the innocent-prisoner episode, with Ashton getting spat on by the inmates, the heroin-junkie episode, with the moist-eyed Ashton giving impassioned speeches, and most painfully, the Born on the Fourth of July episode, with Ashton as a wheelchair bound cripple trying to commit suicide in the bathtub. It's as if the young actor decided that he would prove himself as a dramatic actor by trying out every clichéd serious role in the history of cinema. heh (Amy Smart takes care of the hooker with the heart of gold.) Yet, on a crude level, the movie is an effective scare machine, shrewdly designed for maximum exploitation. Executive produced by Kutcher, it also serves notice of his ambition: He seems willing to try anything. He might even learn how to act. He's a young man, and time, after all, is on his side.
decent review