The Butterfly Effect
| The Butterfly Effect | |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | |
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| Starring | |
| Music by | Michael Suby |
| Cinematography | Matthew F. Leonetti |
| Edited by | Peter Amundson |
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Production
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| Distributed by |
New Line Cinema (United States) Focus Features (International) |
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Release date
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Running time
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114 minutes 120 minutes (Director's cut) |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $13 million |
| Box office | $96.1 million |
The Butterfly Effect is a 2004 American science fiction psychological thriller film written and directed by Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, starring Ashton Kutcher and Amy Smart. The title refers to the butterfly effect, a popular hypothetical example of chaos theory which illustrates how small initial differences may lead to large unforeseen consequences over time.
Kutcher plays 20-year-old college student Evan Treborn, with Amy Smart as his childhood sweetheart Kayleigh Miller, William Lee Scott as her sadistic brother Tommy, and Elden Henson as their neighbor Lenny. Evan finds he has the ability to travel back in time to inhabit his former self (that is, his adult mind inhabits his younger body) and to change the present by changing his past behaviors. Having been the victim of several childhood traumas aggravated by stress-induced memory losses, he attempts to set things right for himself and his friends, but there are unintended consequences for all. The film draws heavily on flashbacks of the characters' lives at ages 7 and 13, and presents several alternate present-day outcomes as Evan attempts to change the past, before settling on a final outcome.
The film received a poor critical reception, but was nevertheless a commercial success, producing gross earnings of $96 million from a budget of $13 million. The film won the Pegasus Audience Award at the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival, and was nominated for Best Science Fiction Film at the Saturn Awards and Choice Movie: Thriller in the Teen Choice Awards.
Growing up, Evan Treborn and his friends, Lenny and siblings Kayleigh and Tommy Miller, suffered many severe psychological traumas that frequently caused Evan to black out. These traumas include being coerced to take part in child pornography by Kayleigh and Tommy's father, George Miller (Eric Stoltz), being nearly strangled to death by his institutionalized father, Jason Treborn (Callum Keith Rennie), who is then killed in front of him by guards; accidentally killing a mother and her infant daughter while playing with dynamite with his friends; and seeing his dog being burned alive by Tommy.
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Wikipedia