Films
In arguably the earliest illustration of the butterfly effect in a story on film, an angel in It's a Wonderful Life (1946) shows George Bailey how rewriting history so that George was never born would detrimentally affect the lives of everyone in his hometown. In a subtle butterfly effect, snow falls in one version of reality but not the other.
The complex plot of the 1985 film Brazil by Terry Gilliam is set into motion when a bug gets caught in machinery, changing the arrest order of "Archibald Tuttle" into the innocent "Archibald Buttle."
In the Polish film Blind Chance directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski, three parallel outcomes are shown depending on how the protagonist Witek deals with the obstacles on his way to catching a train, and whether he catches it. The film was made in 1981 but only released in 1987, due to suppression by the Polish authorities.
In "The Ray Bradbury Theater", an episode from 1989 adapts the story very closely. The episode is named "The Sound of Thunder".
The 1998 British movie Sliding Doors (influenced by Blind Chance) runs two parallel stories of the same woman, Helen (Gwyneth Paltrow). In one universe, Helen manages to catch a London Underground train home on time, and in the other she misses it. This small event influenced her life dramatically.
The French film Le Battement d'ailes du papillon (2000), translated as Happenstance in the English release, makes direct references to the butterfly effect in title, dialogue, and theme.
In 12B, a 2001 Tamil Film, Butterfly Effect is the theme of the story.
In many cases, minor and seemingly inconsequential actions in the past are extrapolated over time and can have radical effects on the present time of the main characters. In the movie The Butterfly Effect (2004), Evan Treborn (Ashton Kutcher), when reading from his adolescent journals, is able to essentially "redo" parts of his past. As he continues to do this, he realizes that even though his intentions are good, the actions he takes always have unintended consequences. Despite its title, however, this movie does not seriously explore the implications of the butterfly effect; only the lives of the principal characters seem to change from one scenario to another. The greater world around them is mostly unaffected. Furthermore, the changes made in the past of the principal character are far from minor and in that sense the title of the film is a misnomer. An element of the butterfly effect in general terms is that differences in start conditions for different scenario outcomes are virtually undetectable, and consequences are not related to cause in a directly apparent way.
On the other hand, the movie Run Lola Run (Lola rennt in German - 1998), represents the butterfly effect more clearly. Minor and almost sub-conscious actions in everyday life can be seen to have gross and widespread effects upon the future. For example, the fact that Lola bumps into someone instead of passing by may lead to a painful death after suffering paralysis. As such, seemingly inconsequential actions can be seen to have drastic long-term results.
The 2008, Tamil film, Dasavatharam story and screenplay by Kamal Hassan is probably one that details and tends to explain the butterfly effect across generations and centuries. The impact of a 12th century event in probably causing the 2005 Tsunami is detailed. Also the small decisions and courses of action taken by 10 different unconnected characters in shaping the natural course of good prevailing over evil and the Tsunami which was considered to be nature's fury is only a way of saving the world from greater man-made fury, makes an interesting study of cause and effect.
The second film in the Back to the Future trilogy also vividly illustrates the cascading and broad effects of what seemed a minor change in the course of events: because the loathsome Biff Tannen accidentally gets his hands on a sports almanac from 2015, he is able to grow rich and corrupt Marty McFly's home town. When McFly (Michael J. Fox) returns to 1985, he finds it utterly degraded from what used to be.
In the 2000 movie Frequency, a son, John Sullivan (James Caviezel), has an opportunity to prevent the death of his father, Frank Sullivan (Dennis Quaid), through a miracle of nature in which they were both able to communicate across time 30 years using the same ham radio, transmitting the signal via a freak occurrence of the Northern Lights. This one action, however, had several undesirable consequences, including the murder of his mother by a vicious killer known as the Nightingale who was supposed to have never been caught. In the original timeline, when the killer is lying unconscious in the hospital, he dies from a reaction of two medicines, Benazepril and Benadryl that were mistakenly administered intravenously into his system. In the alternate timeline, Frank visits his wife, a nurse named Julia, at the hospital immediately after surviving the fire in which he was supposed to die. As they are talking, she sees the wrong medication being administered to the killer. She prevents this from happening, and the killer survives to murder not only her, but six more people; all nurses. Also, this film illustrates a theoretical side effect of the butterfly effect, where John is able to remember the original future time, as well as other alternate futures that were created each time his father changed something in the past.
In the 1990 movie Havana with Robert Redford and Lena Olin, Redford even makes a direct reference to: "And a butterfly can flutter its wings over a flower in China and cause a hurricane in the Caribbean. I believe it. They can even calculate the odds. It just isn't likely and it takes so long." He's referring to the probability of the two of their characters ever getting together. Redford's character was a gambler in late 50's Cuba and Olin was spotted earlier in the movie looking at books on the Theory of Numbers and Probability in the apartment of Redford's character.
In another 1990 movie Mr. Destiny, James Belushi plays Larry, a man who blames all of his life's problems on the fact that he struck out during a key moment of a high school baseball game. Michael Caine plays the title role of Mr. Destiny and allows Larry to live the life he would have had if his high school at-bat resulted in a game-winning home run instead of a game-losing strike three. Larry discovers that he is no longer married to Ellen, the woman he loves, played by Linda Hamilton but is now married to the glamorous Cindy Jo, played by Rene Russo. In this case, that one baseball hit in high school made Larry rich and powerful.
In the 1993 movie, Jurassic Park, Jeff Goldblum's character Dr. Malcolm attempts to explain chaos theory to Laura Dern's character, Dr. Sattler, specifically using the butterfly effect as an example.
In the 2005 movie A Sound of Thunder (borrowing the title from the Ray Bradbury story mentioned in the next section), an accidental killing of a butterfly literally triggers time waves that change the present bit by bit.
The 2009 Japanese film Fish Story directed by Yoshihiro Nakamura depicts how a mistake made by an inexperienced translator helps humankind survive more than 50 years after the original mistake itself is made.
In the 2010 film Hot Tub Time Machine, the butterfly effect is mentioned when Jacob explains that stepping on an insect in the past may, for instance, result in the internet ceasing to exist in the future.
The concept is referred to specifically - when describing how Nemo Nobody's parents met - and generally throughout the film Mr. Nobody (2009). In the plot, multiple stories are told consecutively with the differences being the result of choices made by the main character, Nemo Nobody.
Two episodes of Ugly Betty viz. "The Butterfly Effect Part 1" and "The Butterfly Effect Part 2".
Read more about this topic: Butterfly Effect In Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the word films:
“Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, for its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.”
—David Thomson, U.S. film historian. America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture, ch. 8, William Morrow (1977)
“The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.”
—Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930)
“Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)