Plot
In the year 2002, Evan Treborn (Ashton Kutcher) frequently suffers from blackouts, often at moments of high stress. As a young child (played by Logan Lerman) and adolescent (played by John Patrick Amedori), Evan suffered many severe sexual abuse and psychological traumas. These traumas include being forced to take part in child pornography, being strangled by his mentally-ill father, causing an accident with dynamite with his friends, and seeing his dog being burned by his friend. Seven years later, while "entertaining" a girl in his dorm room, he realizes that when he reads from his adolescent journals, he can travel back in time, and is able to "redo" parts of his past. His time traveling episodes account for the frequent blackouts he experienced as a child. However, there are consequences to his choices that propagate back to his present life, his alternate personal futures progress from college student, to prisoner, to amputee. His efforts are driven by the desire to undo the most unpleasant events of his childhood which coincide with his mysterious blackouts, including saving his childhood sweetheart Kayleigh (Amy Smart) from being molested by her father (Eric Stoltz) and tormented by her sadistic brother (William Lee Scott).
The actions he takes, and enables others to take during his blackouts, change the timeline in the new future where he awakes. As he continues to do this he realizes that even though his intentions are good, his actions have unforeseen consequences. Moreover, the assimilation of dozens of years' worth of new memories from the alternate timelines causes him brain damage and severe nosebleeds. Ultimately, he decides that his attempts to alter the past end up only harming those he cares about, and realizes that the main cause of everyone's suffering in all the different timelines is himself.
At the conclusion of the film, Evan purposely travels back in time one final time to the first day he met Kayleigh. Before this, Evan learns that Kayleigh had a choice to either stay with her mom or her dad. Because she wanted to stay with Evan, she decided to stay with her dad, which caused all the problems in the first place. By scaring her away, Evan makes sure that she goes with her mom, thus allowing her to never be a part of his life. Through this, Evan finally succeeds in saving her life. He then destroys all of his journals and memories so that he is not ever tempted again to make any more changes.
The film ends eight years in the future with Evan leaving an office building in Manhattan and passing Kayleigh on a crowded sidewalk. They alternately pause and turn after spotting and passing each other. After a moment of hesitation, Evan lets her walk away without speaking to her.
Read more about this topic: The Butterfly Effect
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“After I discovered the real life of mothers bore little resemblance to the plot outlined in most of the books and articles I’d read, I started relying on the expert advice of other mothers—especially those with sons a few years older than mine. This great body of knowledge is essentially an oral history, because anyone engaged in motherhood on a daily basis has no time to write an advice book about it.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)