“Just think of your mind as a movie, you can pause, rewind or slow down any details you want.”

Justin’s Rating: But what if one butterfly flapping cancels another one out? CHECKMATE, insect kingdom!

Justin’s Review: Once, there was an evil butterfly. Being so small and so fragile, even his evil could not do very much, physically, to harm others. So this butterfly schemed and schemed, and eventually worked his way up the corporate ladder to become a script supervisor for New Line Studios. Rubbing his evil little hands together, and twitching his evil antennae, the butterfly was finally in a position to carry out his master plan — to make a movie which would ruin Ashton Kutcher for his work in Dude, Where’s My Car?

“Ha ha ha,” the evil butterfly chuckled unoriginally. “Now all I have to do is get Sean William Scott into something degrading!”

The Butterfly Effect is a film that sounds and looks cool and culty — from a distance. A large distance. It’s a story about a college student (Kutcher goes to college?) who can leap back in time in his memories to change the present. Whee! This has never been done before, everyone in the world realized, except for the other five billion time travel flicks where someone monkeys around with the past in order to “set things right.” Al, what does Ziggy say about the probabilities, there?

But unlike the ’80s, where time travel had a fun spirit to it in movies, like in Back to the Future, it seems like modern scifi has only one route to take with this theme: depressing, and much, much more depressing. It’s not been a bad move, considering that time-themed films like Donnie Darko and Memento struck a chord with fans. Unfortunately, The Butterfly Effect goes far too overboard with its dark theme and becomes something soul-crushing instead of geek-thrilling.

We begin the film in the past, where we meet Evan (Kutcher and various kids). Evan’s a cute, nice kid, but he’s in for a trip to hell and back. You see, Evan and his friends have the most messed-up childhood ever. They encounter child pornographers, dog killers, accidentally murder people, spend blocks of time in mental asylums, and draw naughty pictures in art class. As we progress through his childhood, Evan keeps blacking out at key moments, leaving him — and us — in the dark as to what actually happened. To help calm his blackout episodes, he takes to journaling all of his experiences in poor handwriting.

In the present, Evan discovers that by reading his journals, he can go back in time (putting his mind into his childhood body) and change events. Considering that him and his friends’ lives are a mess, why not start changing things for the better? Maybe the new “present” that he creates will be improved and he’ll get his dream girl!

Tsk. Tsk. You should know better than that, Evan. Well, prepare for unending torment!

Admittedly, all of that sounds cool. It’s interesting and contains just enough of a difference from said time travel films (plus the more uplifting Frequency) to draw you in for a watch. Where it falls apart is the filmmaker’s determination not to make anything happy for Evan.

It’s a sad film. It’s a film soaked in despair and hung out to dry in the winds of pathos. It’s a film where Evan can do no good, make no positive change that doesn’t end up backfiring on him a hundred-fold over. It’s a film where no one will listen to his side of the truth, and he doesn’t try that hard to be anything other than a whipping-dog for fate. Considering all that, it’s a film that takes more out of you to watch than gives back in return.

By the way, there are two endings to choose from, if you‘ve got the DVD, and the director’s cut (which I watched) is more depressing but more true to the spirit of the film. Neither of them, however, hands out hope to the audience, something that is desperately needed in this movie.

Kutcher’s acting is a more straight-forward problem. He’s obviously trying to break out of being typecast as a goofy comedian, but this role just doesn’t fit him. There are a couple scenes, particularly when he’s a frat boy with a horrible batch of facial hair, where his attempts to emote “happiness” becomes “Mom, lookit the goofy clown!”

Since there are better and more uplifting time travel movie options out there, I can’t really recommend this to you. Not that every movie needs a happy ending, but there at least needs to be the hope of one. The Butterfly Effect is a naughty butterfly indeed.