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:
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)