I saw one reviewer complain that this movie is really inappropriate for children.

Well, maybe that’s why it was given an R rating. You think?

Evan Treborn (Logan Lerman, John Patrick Amedori, Ashton Kutcher, in order by age) has a minor psychological problem; critical moments in his boyhood life are blacked out. He’s apparently inherited this condition from his father Jason, who is locked away in the Sunnyvale Sanatorium. He keeps a log (diary) in a set of composition books as an attempt to resolve this problem.

Many awful things happen to him during his blackouts. His best friend Kayleigh Miller’s (Sarah Widdows, Irene Gorovaia, Amy Smart) father stars the two of them in a kiddie porn flic made with his new videocam; Evan finds himself in the kitchen holding a butcher knife and apparently threatening his mother; a harmless prank with a stick of dynamite in a mailbox turns not so harmless and friend Lenny (Kevin Schmidt, Elden Henson) goes into convulsions; Kayleigh’s brother Tommy (Cameron Bright, Jesse James, William Lee Scott), an unregenerate and brutal bully, burns Evan’s dog to death (fortunately off-screen). Eventually, for various reasons, Evan and his mother leave town, with Evan promising to return to save Kayleigh from her father and brother, but he forgets and goes to college, where he is very successful in his chosen field — psychology, what else?

Eventually Evan discovers what his late father discovered before him — that you can not only go back in your mind and visit these memory blackouts, to find what went on in them, but you can even interpose yourself into them and make modifications of what happened before. Of course, the modifications lead to complete changes in your present — and if you haven’t foreseen them (and Evan never does), those changes may turn out to be unpleasant.

I enjoyed the movie, but noticed two things about it:

(1) There seemed to be a lot of Steven King influence. King has written a number of stories about a group of young friends growing into an adulthood of genuine weirdness with its roots in their childhood (most notably “It” and the more recent “Dreamcatcher”; “Stand By Me” might also be considered as an extraordinary variant of the genre). To a great extent, the movie is not so much about Evan’s faculty as it is about his relations with Kayleigh, Tommy and Lenny, and how he uses his faculty to try to fix that relationship.

(2) The title bothered me. “The Butterfly Effect” of chaos theory basically states that, at least under some conditions and in some fields, the results of actions are not predictable. In fact, I didn’t see anything in this movie that, given a knowledge of the characters and a little thought, wouldn’t have been eminently predictable (Evan just doesn’t think). Simply put, the movie’s name was perhaps not ill-chosen but certainly as incorrectly descriptive of the theme as Spielberg’s “Poltergeist” was in its time.

But, by and large, an enjoyable film.

I luv the butterfly effect it is my fave movie of all time i think jesse james(tommy miller)is so cute cheers for da site