At least in the world of time travel films, it seems that the way to get a lot of attention and a cult following is to create a story in which the rules of time are not immediately clear. Both Primer and Donnie Darko gained prominence this way. Another film that has a strong following in large part because it is difficult to understand is Butterfly Effect.
If you have heard about this film, you likely will have heard that it is very depressing. That may be because there are two versions, and diehard fans prefer the director's cut. This analysis is of the theatrical release, and the director's cut will be excluded as parole evidence. There are reasons why footage hits the cutting room floor, and not all of them are about time constraints. It is reported that the main character commits suicide in the director's cut; in the theatrical release he only attempts to do so. It still has something of a melancholy ending, but is not terribly depressing. It also makes a rather good film, enjoyable in its own terms, apart from the time travel elements.
It is the story of Evan Treborn, played in his adult years by Ashton Kutcher; it has been observed that his name is a play on the words event reborn, but the name is downplayed in the film, mentioned only once about halfway through, earlier known from his first name and his mother's name. Evan is a somewhat troubled child who has blackouts, moments in his life during which he does things he is not aware he is doing. These worry his mother, in part because some of those things, such as drawing a picture of himself with a knife standing over two bodies, are themselves frightening, and partly because his father apparently suffered from a similar problem with memory gaps and then later had a more serious condition which led to him being institutionalized.
Other than this problem, Evan is very intelligent, well-liked, and successful; but when he is twenty and a college sophomore studying psychology and particularly memory problems, he has an entirely different experience. Reading part of one of his journals to a girl visiting his dorm, he suddenly loses touch with reality and experiences the events which to that point he had never known. He experiments with this, determining first that these are the real events of his past and second that he has the power to change them and so alter the course of his life and the lives of those around him.
The film's name comes from the principle of chaos theory which maintains that very small causes support very great effects, and thus that whenever Evan changes any detail the outcomes are unpredictable. Those outcomes are not that unpredictable, but it frequently happens that whenever Evan attempts to make everything better, something gets much worse, driving him to attempt to change it all yet again. Ultimately he creates a world in which everything is reasonably good for everyone he knows, but at the cost of never having Kayleigh in his life, the one girl he most dearly loved in every other iteration. She, her brother Tommy, and Evan's friend Lenny are in most versions of his life in one way or another.
Tracing the timelines is very challenging; but the most challenging of all proves to be the initial history. Before we can address that, though, we must come to grips with the blackouts, what causes them, and how they relate to the time travel. That is where we will start next time.
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