Has anyone seen the Butterfly Effect? I rented it without very high expectations and found it to be a pretty good movie. An interesting take on the time travel concept.
I've see it a few month ago and I find it was looking a lot like a french book I read call "le don" but it's a good movie
It's quite nice... the whole concept of time travel in the movie tell us that Time is not like that story about the flow of a river, that if you throw a rock on it the river will never stop flowing, it will only make some small and superficial disturbances in the water... the butterfly effect, now, theres a cool concept of what could happen if one could travel back in time , the danger I mean!
WARNING: Spoilers abound, so if you haven't seen the movie you may not want to read this. The Butterfly Effect was an excellent concept for a movie but it was poorly executed. I found many flaws in the logic of the movie. The film features "the butterfly effect" which is a kind of chaos theory that goes something like "one small thing can change things majorly in the long run." (Example: a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world can cause a hurricane in another part of the world.) This is demonstrated in the movie when Ashton Kutcher's character changes small things in the past, thus making the entire present different. The problem is that the film completely disregards the butterfly effect many times. Remember the first time he recalls the mailbox incident? The only thing he did differently that time was letting the cigarette fall from his mouth and burn his stomach. When he snaps out of his flashback in the present, he now has a burn mark on his stomach, BUT EVERYTHING ELSE IS THE SAME?! That burn mark would have changed A LOT. Where's the butterfly effect on that one? Also, after he changes what happened in the basement with the pervert guy, howcome the rest of the events afterwards in his journal (such as the dog-burning) are exactly the same as they were before? They should have been a lot different or completely cancelled because of what he changed. Arg! Oh well, the movie was okay besides that (besides Ashton's acting). I especially enjoyed the ending sequence. Good choice of music (Oasis - Stop Crying Your Heart Out) Oasis Rocks!
I agree with GrimCreeper, and in particular I think the jail/stigmata scene would have changed even more than a burn mark (Imagine that happening in a classroom and the teacher being more concerned with the drawing!). That said, all movies have some flaws of that sort, and this one was better than most.
If you haven't watched the Directors Cut ending, it's worth it. I found the movie a good thinker, but with too much cut out. I enjoyed it, except the great extremes they went to to portray them as such snobby asses in the frat part. Other than that, it was okay... even with Ashtons acting.
Haven't seen the movie yet (it's in my rental queue) but surely the point of the butterfly effect is that small changes could alter things, not that they always do? Small changes could tip the scales if they were evenly loaded, but some things will happen regardless, due to more compelling external pressures, or a degeneracy in potential outcomes?
"but surely the point of the butterfly effect is that small changes could alter things" ive seen it, the changes he makes arent small. ie, instead of appearing as a 8ish year old in a porno movie with this chick, he tells the chicks father basically to fuck off another 'small' change instead of letting this guy get away with lots of shit, he gives some other guy a jagged piece of metal to kill him with...
I watched it with my mother last time she visited and noticed the same flaws grimreaper did. It was so very irritating trying to explain to my mother why those moments contradicted the butterfly effect concept Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Also when he's in prison and he goes back in time to put scars in his hands, then he's still in prison. Maybe he could have coincidentally ended up in prison anyway for some other reason, but the nazis were still after him and etc, It just doesn't fly. Him stabbing his hands in the class room would have lead to a different string of incidences after that moment to make up his life. Thats the whole point of the butterfly effect. 1 tiny thing changes everything in the future. It was an entertaining movie none the less. Truth be told I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it.
Guys, you're missing the point of the butterfly effect. It is that small changes _could_ have an effect, not that all changes always do! Events on a cusp can be effected by the smallest things, but some events it might not be possible to change no matter what. This is the point, it's chaos, we cannot predict the outcomes of even small changes, but we cannot know when a small change will be relevant either.
Well thats bullshit, that might be the idea but it's incorrect if it is. Something like going back in time and stabbing holes in your hands would definately change the rest of your life. You would have acted differently afterwards and your teacher would have acted differently afterwards, as well as your mother etc, and it just would have lead to things being completely different. There's no way around it. I really think any little change in your history wouldn't lead to you being exactly where you are now with everything the same, something pretty big like slamming your hands on spikes would definately change everything. Its not some wierd magic thing how things change, "sometimes things will change sometimes they won't, its a mystery", its just common logic because everything that happens happens because of something that preceeded it. If the thing that caused it was different in any way the result would be different. Even if small, the change is just bound to grow and grow overtime, drifting further and further away from how things would have turned out if that small difference didn't happen.
Er, like I said, events on a cusp, can be changed by small events, others might not get changed. It's chaos, not 'common logic'. You might change something, switch lanes if you will, only to switch back because the new path leads back to the old one through some circumstance. This was the point I made about 'degeneracy in potential outcomes' Your 'common logic' fails, and here's an example. Take a coin out of your pocket, toss it, and look at the outcome. If it had landed the other way up, how would your life have turned out differently? Another example. Pour water down a slope. Sometimes, the path of the water splits into two streams, a bifurcation. Sometimes, those two streams join up again. If all the water ends up at the same point after splitting and joining again, what does it matter what the path taken was? The 'changes' you see as major, may just be small deviations, and eventually mean nothing.
Ok well none of the things in the movie were like that, they were events that would have had a big effect. Even so, you wouldn't know what would eventually happen from these hypothetical small deviations. Just your thinking while you drive into a different lane or the memory of driving into a different lane could change the way you would have been thinking at a certain time had you never driven into that lane and this would lead to a different thought and so on and so on untill you are doing some action you wouldn't have wound up doing had you not driven into that lane for that 2 seconds. I don't know about water "bifurcating", maybe it picked up some particle by drifting over there? Ha ok, I really don't know but I don't think you're grasping how events are invariably stringed together and related. Me flipping a coin and getting a tails might inspire me to call a tails later in life when there is something riding on the outcome. Our minds are involved, and so practically everything leaves some impression on us and alters our future course.
Actually changing lanes could have caused a traffic jam (because of the dynamic and chaotic nature of traffic. traffic jams can occur for no apparent reason whatspever), which could have had other effects on your life. Maybe a person crashed into another car at the back of the traffic jam. A person who owuld later change your life. Maybe many people got into a bad mood because of the traffic jam and their lives changed because of this, aslo altering yours.
Small change, and the cigarette burn on his stomach wouldn't have changed anything about the events of that day. Just changed his body, so there wasn't any huge effect. He only told the father to stop abusing his daughter, and stop making films. He did not address the boy being abused, only focused it away from the brother. The brother in that scene is still twisting the dolls head and looking sadistic to show subtlely that the damage had already been done to him and that his path would not change. Which it didn't. It's only the second time he goes back that he addressed how the boy was treated and that the father needed to get him help for his son. That is when the son's life was changed. It's not the best movie, but I thought it was thought provoking at the very least. Made you think about what little things you would change in your own life to make a better one for today.
