The Butterfly Effect

This movie is amazing. For the longest time people have been telling me it sucks but i just watched it and it is Fuck-Awesome.

Plot summary

Evan Treborn (Ashton Kutcher), who suffered severe traumas as a boy (Logan Lerman) and a teenager (John Patrick Amedori), blacks out frequently, often at moments of high stress. While searching for an answer to heal his emotional wounds, he finds that when he reads from his adolescent journals, he travels back in time, and is able to essentially "redo" parts of his past, and thereby causing the blackouts he experienced as a child. There are consequences of his choices, however, that he then propagates back to the present; his alternate futures vary from frat boy to prisoner to amputee. As he continues to do this, he realizes that even though his intentions are good, the actions he takes always have unintended consequences. In addition, he needs to go further back in time after every attempt as several fatal mistakes he makes do something to wipe out that and all subsequent journal entries.


Age 7

In his childhood, Evan Treborn begins to experience sudden memory blackouts. His mother, Andrea, fears that he might have inherited his father's mental illness. His father, Jason Treborn, is in an asylum. Evan's doctor advises Evan to keep a daily journal to train his memory.

A first blackout happens in 1989 at school while Evan is drawing a picture of his future. The very detailed picture shows a man with a knife, standing over two bodies covered in blood. Evan's teacher is rather worried and shows the picture to Andrea. Evan doesn't remember having drawn it.

Evan experiences a second blackout at home, when Andrea accidentally sees her son holding a knife. Evan has no recollection of picking up the knife.

Another day, Evan is at his neighbor's house, playing with Kayleigh & Tommy. Kayleigh's father, George, asks him to be in a movie about Robin Hood. There is a third blackout — Evan finds himself standing in the basement of Miller's house, naked. By his side stands Kayleigh, similarly undressed. It is apparent that they had been forced to participate in a child pornography video.

Evan's mother talks with a doctor about Evan's strange behavior, who convinces her that Evan may be acting out because he has no father figure in his life. They arrange for Evan to visit his father as a remedy.

Evan experiences a fourth blackout when he sees his father, Jason, at the clinic. The meeting starts as it should, but all of sudden there is a flash — and Evan finds himself on the floor with his father trying to strangle him. The guards burst in, and while violently restraining Jason, they kill him.


Age 13


The fifth blackout happens in 1995 when Evan spends his time with the Millers and Lenny Kagan, another childhood friend. While hanging out together one afternoon, they find a dynamite stick in the Millers' basement and decide to play a prank with it. They plant it in a mailbox, light the fuse, and wait. Again, a flash indicating a blackout — Evan and others are running through the forest, and Lenny is catatonic. Evidently something terrible happened, but Evan can't remember what it was and no one will tell him. Lenny is taken to the clinic in a state of deep shock. Evan's mother brings Evan to the doctor for hypnosis to recover the memory lost in the blackout, but the session is ended abruptly by the doctor when Evan begins to have a seizure and nosebleed.

Not long afterwards, Evan, Kayleigh and Tommy sneak into the movie Se7en. Kayleigh leaves when she finds one of the earlier scenes disturbing, and Evan follows her out. He apologizes, and says it was a bad idea. Kayleigh asks him about the forest, and he comforts her. Somewhat awkwardly, they kiss. Then Tommy walks in. He threatens the couple in a fit of rage, but is tripped by an older boy, whom Tommy nearly beats to death for embarrassing him. He is subsequently taken away by security, sneering cruelly at Evan as he moves past him.

A couple of days later, Evan and Kayleigh go and find Lenny, whom they had not seen since the dynamite incident. On their way to the cabin, they find Tommy, who in his anger at Evan ( for kissing Keyleigh) has kidnapped his dog and tied it in a sack. He threatens to set the sack on fire. There is a flash and again for the sixth time Evan has a blackout. He wakes up with Kayleigh sitting crying next to him with a deep cut on her face, and himself all bruised and battered. He also sees Lenny sitting near the fire, where the sack had been burned.

He is then forced to move away, and promises Kayleigh that he will "come back for [her]".

Age 20

In 2002, Evan is in college, majoring in psychology. When he brings a girl back to his dormroom, she discovers his old diaries and Evan reads about the events preceding the sixth blackout. In a flash, he finds himself living the missed events of the sixth blackout. He watches Lenny try to free the dog, but unable to untie the ropes. This leads him to return to his hometown to find Lenny isolated in his unchanged childhood room, finding him now extremely socially avoidant. After speaking to Lenny, Evan realizes the vision in his dormroom really happened.

Seeking to reproduce this strange effect, he reads an extract about the fifth blackout and in a similar experience, learns that while they were waiting for the dynamite to blow up, a woman with a baby came to the postbox and both were killed by the explosion. The kids stand there horrified and don't warn her, then run off into the woods after the explosion. Lenny is rendered catatonic by guilt.

Waking from this dream, Evan finds that the cigarette burn he experienced in this memory has appeared in the current reality. Talking with his mother, she implies that his father had the same ability to travel through time. (In the director's cut, this is where Evan and his mother visit the palmist—See below)

Determined to learn more, Evan visits his childhood town to find Kayleigh. Kayleigh says that they kept Tommy in "juvie for a few years but now he's working at Dale's Auto Body". She also says that she emancipated herself at 15 because of her father, and that she couldn't have moved in with her mom because the mother had a new family and didn't have enough room. Evan starts asking about the video her father forced them to do; his questions stir up very unpleasant memories, and the next day, Kayleigh commits suicide.

Evan extrapolates from his cigarette burn scar that he may be able to change the past through his diaries. He reads about the third blackout, jumps in the past and very effectively threatens George Miller into treating his daughter with respect and disciplining Tommy. The vision ends, and Evan returns to the present. where he experiences a painfully headrush as he acquires new memories of all the intervening years (and a nosebleed).

The 2nd timeline

In this new timeline, Kayleigh snuck out to see Evan after he moved away, and they are now a couple in the same university. Kayleigh is a sorority girl and Evan seems to be a leader in a fraternity. Kayleigh's father was good to her (due to Evan informing him about her suicide in her years to come); however, her brother Tommy, who has recently returned from the reformatory, has become even more violent and disturbed, as their father never laid a hand on Kayleigh and "saved it all for Tommy". Tommy traces Evan and Kayleigh, trashes Evan's car, and attempts to kill Evan with a metal bat. Evan manages to overcome Tommy using mace spray, kicks and beats him, and then kills him with the metal bat in his fury. The police arrive and apprehend Evan, who is put in prison.

Evan persuades his religious cellmate to help him by producing stigmata much the same way as the cigarette burn scar before. He travels back to the age of seven where he is in the classroom and he creates the disturbing drawing, and then impales his hands on paper spindles. With his cellmate convinced and ready to help, Evan attempts to talk two prisoners into giving him the diaries back. When the two prisoners are ready to bargain, they ask for a fellatio in exchange for the diaries. Instead, Evan and his cellmate attack the two prisoners and steal the diaries back. Evan begins to read the diaries, and just as the two prisoners begin to attack Evan, Evan returns to the sixth blackout. He gives Lenny a sharp iron shard so he can cut the dog's rope. Moreover, he succeeds in talking Tommy into releasing the dog. Suddenly, Lenny stabs Tommy with the shard, killing him. Kayleigh wakes up with a disfigured face. A glimpse of Lenny going catatonic is visible, then Evan wakes up.

The 3rd timeline

Evan is back in his original dormroom that he shares with Thumper. While he gains the new memories, he discovers that Lenny is now kept in the asylum for killing Tommy, and that Kayleigh was hitchhiking. Evan suffers a massive nosebleed; Thumper finds him and calls 911. Evan's mother and the childhood doctor are there looking at the new brainscans which, compared to the "ones taken last year" show haemorrhaging "in the outer layer of the cerebral cortex" and "massive neural reconstruction" from "jamm[ing] 40 years worth of memories into [his] head in the last year" and "completely reprogramming [his] brain". Evan steals the doctor's id to visit Lenny, who asks if Evan knew something big was going to happen that day when he put the shard in Lenny's hand. Lenny says that Evan should be locked up in his place.

Evan travels back to his meeting with his father to ask him how to break the cycle. His father tells him that it is impossible to play god; the only solution left is to stop and accept things as they are, saying that even now by coming back he could be killing his mother. When Evan persists, his father leaps over the table to strangle him.

Evan returns to the present time and goes to Kayleigh's house to ask her dad where she is. He discovers Kayleigh has become a prostitute and a visible drug addict. From talking to her, Evan supposes that if he could prevent the death of the woman and her baby from the mailbox explosion in the fifth blackout, Lenny wouldn't have gone insane, Tommy won't be killed, and Kayleigh wouldn't have been traumatized. He returns to the past and rushes to the postbox. Tommy unexpectedly follows him, bringing the woman to the ground, and the explosion indirectly hits Evan only.

The 4th timeline

As Evan slowly wakes up in his college dorm room, he sees Kayleigh in the other bed with Lenny, whom he at first mistakes for Thumper. Evan stretches and realises that both his hands and his left forearm are missing. As new memories flood into Evan's mind, he discovers that the amputations and his paralyzed legs are the result of the mailbox explosion. Evan's nosebleed this time is even more severe than the previous ones.

Kayleigh and Lenny are now together, and Tommy has become very religious. Evan reveals to Kayleigh how much he loves her. Kayleigh in turn tells Evan that the only reason she chose to live with her father was because if she had gone to live with her mother, she might never have seen Evan again. She further says that it may have been possible that they might have become lovers, given different circumstances.

Distraught, and appearing to believe that everyone else is better off in this timeline, Evan attempts to drown himself in a bathtub, but he is saved by Tommy. He then finds out that in this timeline, his mother started smoking heavily after the accident, and she is in the hospital with lung cancer under a DNI directive.

This drives Evan to return to the second blackout. Evan searches through the kitchen, looking for something with which to destroy the dynamite, and the scene plays out as before with his mother walking in on him with the knife in his hand. He returns to present again before he can make any changes.

After this failure, Evan returns again to the time of the third blackout in the Millers' basement, planning to destroy the stick of dynamite so it can never be planted in the mailbox. He lights it to threaten George Miller as before, but he drops it in a struggle with George Miller, and Kayleigh picks it up and is killed in the explosion.

The 5th timeline

Evan in a mental institution for killing Kayleigh, and he is told that (in this timeline) his journals never existed, that they were part of a fantasy he created out of his guilt of killing Katie. However, by talking to the same doctor, he discovers that his father traveled through time by using an old photo album (which, similarly to the diaries in this timeline, as told by the doctor, no longer exists).

He makes his last attempt to fix everything, using an old film about the first acquaintance with Kayleigh. Upon his meeting Kayleigh, Evan now threatens to kill her family unless she stays away from him to prevent them from ever becoming friends. As Kayleigh runs away, terrified of the boy and crying to her mother, Evan whispers to her, "goodbye".

The 6th timeline

At last, everything is fine. Nothing stops Tommy and Kayleigh from moving to their mother's house, and they are raised properly. Tommy (once again) becomes quite religious. Lenny is Evan's roommate, as they study in the university. In order to save Kayleigh and the rest, Evan had to sacrifice her friendship. Evan burns all his diaries and films, as he is content enough with the present and recognizes the instability and delicate nature of the timeline.

At the very end of the film, Evan passes by Kayleigh on a busy street in Manhattan. They notice each other and Kayleigh stops, but by the time Evan turns to look, she has already begun walking again. Although it is obviously painful, Evan realizes he must not follow her. The look on his face is grim and pale.



Blackout timeline

Every time Evan changes his past, he goes to the exact moments when he blacked out. In the early sections of the film we watch young Evan black out several times. Later, we see an adult Evan travel back in time to possess his former childhood self; it is through these temporal journeys that Evan is able to create new distinct timelines. In the first timeline we witness, Evan simply blacks out traumatic moments; later, he is able to revisit these blackout moments by re-reading journal entries about them, which suggests that the blackouts could have been caused by his ability to revisit the past and he "blacks out" when his future self is revisiting his past self. As revealed in the fifth timeline, Evan only began writing the journal entries in response to the blackouts. Thus, the blackouts caused Evan to write the journal, which allowed Evan to travel back to the blackouts, which in turn caused the blackouts in the first place, which caused Evan to write the journal — a causality loop.