Evan discovers that life has not treated Kayleigh his long lost love very well. She is in job as a waitress and thinks that he has come back out of pity. Evan, realizing that his new found power can change lives, goes back to the journals and returns to the moment in time where Kayleigh's father who is a pedophile, George Miller is trying to get his daughter and Evan to perform in his porn movie.
When Evan returns to the present, he and Kayleigh are in college and love each other. But, when you fix one thing, another is likely to break and he discovers that his other friends, Lenny and Kayleigh's brother Tommy don not have the best lives. This is a classic be-careful-what-you-wish-for kind of movie.
Co-directors Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber have made a movie that not only entertains, but also asks us to consider the consequences of our own actions. This film follows Evan as he meddles in his own time stream, changing his future from bad to worse.
The writers try to juggle the time travel dilemmas with the idea that a little change can have huge effects on the future; the title refers to the concept that the beating of a butterfly's wings on one side of the earth can cause a typhoon on the other. It's the Chaos Theory come to life. Unfortunately, once the filmmakers make this point, they repeat it over and over again, and you know that something will go wrong with each subsequent journey.
The directors do a decent job in marshalling their cast around the set with Evan, Kayleigh, Lenny and Tommy played as 8-year old adolescents, teens and young adults. The elder characters, led by Kutcher, are required to put several spins on their characters as their lives are changed by Evan's trips back in time.
The Butterfly Effect manages to move forward without confusing or losing its audience. They make the point that there are unpredictable dangers inherent on the future by making changes in the past.
The ending is weak, and may be the result of the filmmakers writing themselves into a corner and not wanting to conclude things with Evan and Kayleigh reuniting, it retains a degree of going over the top, primarily because the mini stories in the movie are very much based upon true and dark themes.
The Butterfly Effect is about regrets, and the closing sequences emphasize this. Overall the film is enjoyable and very much a movie to see again.
