The quadriplegic Evan Treborn has decided that another trip to the past will save his mother from cancer, and might incidentally restore his arms and legs, not to mention his relationship with Kayleigh. He gets Lenny to help him by holding the notebooks so he can read them. He makes a quick trip back to that afternoon when his mother found him with the knife. He is looking for something to destroy the blockbuster, the explosive which took his arms and legs along with the mailbox. This trip changes nothing, though--he still sees the psychiatrist and he still sees Kayleigh.
Suddenly we are forced to ask why it does not change anything. The film's consistency is breaking down. Using Niven's Law we can easily accept that changing what happens at the mailbox changes what happens with the dog that comes later, but not what happens in the basement which happened earlier, even if those events were influenced by subsequent time travel departures themselves. What happened in this history, after Evan picked up the knife? Does the fact that the past is being rewritten from that moment forward mean that the porn film is made in the basement, or will the other change hold, and the Evan from an earlier future trip to a later point in the past still control what happens there? Actions are being done and undone in inconsistent ways.
Were it even possible to trace the confusing interconnected anomalies of this film, we would conclude that the trip Evan made to warn Mr. Miller still happens in the history from which he came to look for the knife, and thus that he still arrives in the basement to warn Mr. Miller, and that line still exists. It does not lead to the fraternity story, though, because the version of the mailbox scene in which Evan is injured is also unchanged. It is complicated, but at least in this case it works. If we can get to this configuration of history, this trip does not change it. This is really stretching Niven's Law. The Evan who was injured at the mailbox never traveled to the past to warn Mr. Miller against harming Kayleigh, and never saw his dog incinerated. He never knew his friends to be other than the happy people on campus in the future, and has no reason to make any of the trips which ultimately led to his present condition. Absent Niven's Law, most of these timelines result in infinity loops themselves, and again in interaction with each other. Traditional temporal theories do not get us this far without a lot of hazy thinking.
However, the brief effort to arm his younger self before making the Robin Hood movie does not work, and makes no significant changes to the future, so Evan will have to try yet again if he is to create the perfect world.
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