History Film / TheButterflyEffect

The film focuses on Evan Treborn, a young man who can travel back in time by reading his journals and editing them. Evan uses this ability to try to undo various traumatic events he and his friends suffered as children. Despite his best intentions, the results aren't always good for everyone. What's more, his own brain suffers from trying to assimilate all the new memories from these consequences.

It's about Evan Treborn, a young man who can travel back in time by reading his journals and editing them. Evan uses this ability to try to undo various traumatic events he and his friends suffered as children. Despite his best intentions, the results aren't always good for everyone. What's more, his own brain suffers from trying to assimilate all the new memories from these consequences.

It's about Evan Treborn, a guy who can travel back in time by reading his journals and changing what happened then, and uses this ability to try to undo various traumatic events he and his friends suffered as children. Despite his best intentions, the results aren't always good for everyone. What's more, his own brain suffers from trying to assimilate all the new memories from these consequences.

* TeensAreShort: Tommy. He is [[LittleBigBrother shorter]] than his younger sister in their teens.

* BigBad: George Miller, Tommy and Kayleigh's abusive pedophile father, is directly or indirectly responsible for everything bad that happens to the characters.

* DeathIsTheOnlyOption: The director's cut ending invokes this trope. [[spoiler:Evan strangles himself with the umbilical cord in his mother's womb to make life better for the people he knew.]]

* ActorAllusion: Creator/EricStoltz [[WhatCouldHaveBeen/BackToTheFuture finally]] gets to star in a TimeTravel movie (albeit as a HateSink).

* ActorAllusion: Creator/EricStoltz [[WhatCouldHaveBeen/BackToTheFuture finally]] gets to star in a TimeTravel movie (albeit as an incredibly horrible character).

* DeathIsTheOnlyOption: The director's cut ending invokes this trope. [[spoiler:Evan strangles himself with the umbilical cord in his mother's womb to make life better for the people he knew.]]
* DidNotGetTheGirl: In the theatrical ending, Evan realizes the only way for Kayleigh to be happy is to [[spoiler:prevent them from ever befriending each other, so that she and Tommy would choose to live far away with their mom instead of their sexually abusive father. Evan runs into Kayleigh in a downtown street in New York, but he ignores her after hesitating for a moment.]]

* AmbiguouslyJewish: Lenny’s last name, Kagan, is a common surname. No other hints are given.

%%* WorldHalfEmpty

* NiceJobBreakingItHero: Every single goddamn time Evan goes back to "fix" something in the past. The first time, he seems to get it right and has the perfect life when he gets back to the present. But then [[spoiler:he manages to screw it up by murdering his girlfriend's psychotic brother and getting put in prison]]. Brilliant. Tommy was an even bigger [[TheSociopath sociopath]] in this timeline because Evan unkowingly decided to tell [[AbusiveParents his father]] to discipline him more.

* TimeyWimeyBall: The events of roughly half of Evan's blackouts are caused by his older self [[MentalTimeTravel going back to them]], while the other half were normal initially, but could be changed by his older self. One blackout even has examples of both. Also, it is established early on that Evan is the only one who has any memory of the old timelines, but at one point, another character notices a change in the timeline for no apparent reason.

* WombHorror: In the Directors Cut, there's a scene towards the end where [[spoiler:Evan strangles himself as a fetus in the womb of his mother so he [[SuicideForOthersHappiness would never be born to cause harm to the ones he loved]]]]. It's rather played for drama than horror though. Watch the scene [[https://youtu.be/ixYWkDAPPzA?t=23 here]].

* WorldHalfEmpty

* ButtMonkey: Evan and his friends.

* HeelFaithTurn: Tommy in an alternate timeline.

* ImpaledPalm: Evan does this ''to himself'', to get stigmata-like scars on his hands as a little kid, as a part of a complex plan to get his religious present-day cellmate to believe him. (TimeTravel is involved.)

* InSpiteOfANail: Evan goes back in time just to [[{{Squick}} stab his own hands]] on the teacher's spiky desktop notepad in second grade so he can re-live his whole life, land up in the same jail about to be raped by the same prison gang, and prove to his cellmate that he has magical powers in the form of [[WhatDoYouMeanItsNotSymbolic stigmata]]. As if the movie wasn't enough of a MindScrew, [[TimeyWimeyBall every single other time Evan changed the past]], no one else noticed ANYTHING different, but that ONE time his cell mate suddenly notices the "new" scars that should have been there the whole time from his [=PoV=].

* MissingTime: Evan loses time when he uses MentalTimeTravel to go back to events in his childhood.

* NiceJobBreakingItHero: Every single goddamn time he goes back to "fix" something. The first time, he seems to get it right and has the perfect life when he gets back to the present. But then [[spoiler:he manages to screw it up by murdering his girlfriend's psychotic brother and getting put in prison]]. Brilliant.
** Tommy was an even bigger [[TheSociopath sociopath]] in this timeline because Evan decided to tell [[AbusiveParents his father]] to discipline him more.

* PrisonChangesPeople: After one of his trips to the past lands him in prison and another gets him out, the main character is startled by a waitress asking if he'd been in prison. As it turns out, the way he hunched over his food (a defensive technique to keep other prisoners from snatching off his plate) gave him away.
* PrisonRape: A very brutal example involving Evan and the Aryan Brotherhood. [[spoiler:He gives them a GroinAttack, as it was a ploy to get back a diary that he needed to continue his time travels.]]
* PsychicNosebleed: Evan starts to get nosebleeds after he has several blackouts. Each blackout (i.e. each use of his power) cause worse and worse damage to Evan's brain. This is caused by Evan's RippleEffectProofMemory kicking in and the memories being physically written into his brain [[MySkullRunnethOver and co-existing with the older sets]]. After the first couple of times, Evan fiddles with the past, he gets an MRI and the doctor notes that his brain has all the age-induced scarring of someone twice as old as him.
* RealMenLoveJesus: Carlos, Evan's religious cellmate.
* RelationshipResetButton: The ending. [[spoiler:Evan knows that, no matter what he does, his girlfriend will always be miserable if she's with him, so he goes back to his childhood and scares her off. Years later, he crosses her in the street, but of course she has no idea who he is. In the alternate ending, he went back in time and committed suicide in the womb, causing his own stillbirth, so they would never meet!]]

* ReunionVow: Occurs when Evan and Kayleigh are still in adolescence and Kayleigh's family is leaving town. Evan holds up a sign reading, "I'll come back for you." He does several years later, but it doesn't end well...[[SetRightWhatOnceWentWrong at least in that timeline]].

* RippleEffectProofMemory: Memories from the "new" timeline hit Evan in a rush, giving him a nosebleed...caused by [[MySkullRunnethOver brain hemorrhaging]].
* SetRightWhatOnceWentWrong: Heavily deconstructed.

* SlowMotionPassBy: The theatrical release ended on this between [[spoiler:Evan and Kayleigh, having had their memories of each other lost to time travel]], having managed to live lives without being killed or psychologically messed up.

* AnAesop: Similar to that of ''[[Film/TheTimeMachine2002 The Time Machine]]'' remake, all of the bad futures Evan creates are a result of his efforts to create a future where he and his love interest are together. It's only by [[spoiler: scaring Kayleigh at their first meeting, ensuring she never chooses to stay with her abusive father in order to stay close to her best friend, that Evan succeeds in creating a future where everyone is well-adjusted and happy.]] Sometimes, the kindest thing you can do for someone is to let them go.
** This all ties into another lesson that we are all the sum of our experiences, so seemingly small changes can make a huge impact over someone's lifetime.

* BittersweetEnding: The theatrical cut. [[spoiler:Evan makes sure that he and Kayleigh never become friends by being mean to her when he travels back in time to their first meeting. Kayleigh and Tommy live a happy life away from their abusive father, and Evan and Lenny remain lifelong friends. Evan then burns his journals to leave his past behind and make sure he doesn't have access to his time travel abilities anymore. Evan runs into Kayleigh in a downtown street in New York, but he ignores her after hesitating for a moment.]]

* ContinuingIsPainful: The movie takes account of this trope as well, with the protagonist's condition [[MySkullRunnethOver worsening]] [[DeadlyNosebleed permanently]] with each "restart" due to multiple memories.

** Tommy, who is a total sociopath. Except when he's not, and then he's arguably MORE creepy. He's more of a creepy adult then, though.
** Subverted with Evan. His older self mentally occupying his younger body would cause him to act out in very unsettling ways, such as drawing a vicious murder or suddenly appearing close by with a knife in his hand.

* DeadlyPrank: Evan and his friend put a stick of dynamite in someone's mailbox to blow it up. A woman carrying a baby happens to come to check for mail at the worst possible moment, and they're both killed when it detonates.
* DeusAngstMachina: This is a movie in which the main character is molested by his friend's father (along with his friends), physically attacked by his insane father who is then beat to death in front of him, accidentally blows up a woman and her baby in a prank gone wrong, has his pet dog burned to death and watches his best friend go insane... ''within the first '''half hour'''''.
* DoomMagnet: Evan can't catch a break, as described above duo to every misfortune that happens in his vicinity. All endings roll with Evan sort of having this realization: in the theatrical cut, [[spoiler:he decides to nullify having ever known Kayleigh, which completely fixes his life and everyone's around him]]; in the Director's Cut, [[spoiler:he prevents ''his own birth'' by strangling himself in his umbilical cord]].

* DramaticallyMissingThePoint: In one timeline Evan gives Lenny a sharp object so he can cut his dog out of the sack Tommy put him in, then while he's trying to talk Tommy down [[HeelFaceDoorSlam Lenny stabs him]].

** Kayleigh's suicide is what initially motivates Evan to SetRightWhatOnceWentWrong.

* ExpositoryHairstyleChange: Kayleigh's hair color changes depending on how happy she is in whatever timeline. It's brown and mousy in the timelines where she's miserable, and it's blonde when she's happy. [[spoiler:Her hair is blonde at the end]]. Likewise, Lenny has long hair in all the timelines in which his life turned out halfway decent.

* FatBestFriend: Lenny is the ShrinkingViolet type. Thumper is the Big and Brash type.

* ForWantOfANail: A rusty, spiky nail, in all likelihood.

* GoodSmokingEvilSmoking: Evan, Kayleigh, and Tommy smoke in their teen to show that their troubled upbringing have turned them into rebellious teenagers. Keep in mind that they smoke in front of the asthmatic Lenny. In one alternate reality where Evan became quadriplegic, Evan's mother suffers lung cancer after years of chain-smoking.

* HairOfGoldHeartOfGold: In several realities, Kayleigh, especially while still a child.

%%* AbusiveDad: George Miller, who physically abuses his son Tommy and sexually abuses his daughter Kayleigh.

%% * ButtMonkey: Taken to the extreme.
%% Context, please.

%%* WorldHalfEmpty

* AllThereInTheManual: [[spoiler:In the director's cut, which the filmmakers regard to be the "true" version of the movie, Evan's mother has had two stillbirths prior to Evan. When he strangles himself in the womb, it becomes clear – according to Bress and Gruber's commentary, at least – that those two were also time-travelling martyrs. Finally, in the ending montage, his mother is shown with a happy, healthy baby girl, which Bress and Gruber say is a sign that the "curse" is broken, because apparently it only affects boys. Alternately, the baby shown at the end apparently had a different father, who did not pass the time-travel power to this child.]]

* GoodSmokingEvilSmoking: Evan, Kayleigh, and Tommy smoke in their teen to show that their troubled upbringing have turned them into rebellious teenagers. Keep in mind that they smoke in front of the asthmatic Lenny. In one alternate reality where Evan became quadruplegic, Evan's mother suffers lung cancer after years of chain-smoking.

** There are actually two more endings [[AllThereIsToKnowAboutTheCryingGame other than the director's cut]] where things seem even more open-ended. [[spoiler: Evan decides to go in the other direction to follow Kayleigh, or they stop to introduce themselves and decide to get some coffee.]]

* Fanservice: In the second timeline where Evan ends up with Kayleigh, Jacqueline Stewart is a student coming out of the showers still wet and showing full frontal nudity.

* LatinoIsBrown: Averted with Carlos, who is portrayed by white French-Canadian Creator/KevinDurand.

* BittersweetEnding: The theatrical cut. [[spoiler:Evan makes sure that he and Kayleigh never become friends by being mean to her when he travels back in time to their first meeting. Kayleigh and Tommy live a happy life away from their abusive father, and Evan and Lenny remain lifelong friends. Evan runs into Kayleigh in a downtown street in New York, but he ignores her after hesitating for a moment.]]

* BurnBabyBurn: At the end we see Evan burn the timetravel journals that caused him and the people around him so much pain.

* ButtMonkey: Taken to the extreme.

* ContinuingIsPainful: The movie takes account of this trope as well, with the protagonist's condition worsening permanently with each "restart" due to multiple memories.
* CrapsackWorld: It starts here and gets ''worse''. And worse, and worse, and worse...

* DeadlyNosebleed: As Evan does more {{time travel}}, he starts to have nosebleeds, indicating the brain damage he's suffering from doing it.

* DoomMagnet: Evan

* DownerEnding: The director's cut. [[spoiler:Evan realizes that he's the reason why everyone else's lives are so miserable, so he travels back to when he was still in his mother's womb and suffocates himself.]]
* DramaticallyMissingThePoint: In one timeline Evan gives Lenny a sharp object so he can cut his dog out of the sack Tommy put him in, then while he's trying to talk Tommy down [[HeelFaceDoorSlam Lenny stabs him.]]

** [[{{Goth}} Thumper]] gets some characterization in that because Evan most likely never knew Thumper before going to college, so in each scene he appears he's relatively the same. [[spoiler:Such as in the "Evan is a frat jock" timeline, Thumper is walking along the hallway and Evan asks Thumper by name what time it is, to see if he's recognized by his roommate in the other timeline, Thumper curses him out and walks off.]] Thumper dresses similar from scene to scene, stands up for himself when threatened, and seems to be a bit of a Casanova, and [[spoiler:when the new timeline is formed where Thumper and Evan's beds are reversed, in one scene he is making love in Evan's bed instead of his own implying he likes that side of the dorm room (which was Thumper's in the establishing dorm room scene before the timeline changes) better than his own.]]

* GoodSmokingEvilSmoking: Evan, Kayleigh, and Tommy smoke in their teen to show that their troubled upbringing have turned them into rebellious teen. Keep in mind that they smoke in front of the asthmatic Lenny. In one alternate reality where Evan became quadruplegic, Evan's mother suffers lung cancer after years of chain-smoking.

* HeelFaceDoorSlam: Tommy, in one reality. [[spoiler:Evan manages to convince him not to kill his dog and invoke his BigBrotherInstinct...only for Lenny to stab him from behind]].

* IWantMyBelovedToBeHappy: Evan spends the whole movie going back in time to try to end up with the girl, mucking things up more and more, before figuring out that this is the only way to go. In fact, this {{Aesop}} is taken to an extreme, as in ''everyone in the world would be better off without knowing you at all''. In an alternate ending, the character figures ''that'' out as well, and ''[[spoiler:strangles himself in the womb.]]'' [[SarcasmMode God knows]] why they don't show [[DownerEnding that one]] on TV... It's also strongly implied that this alternate ending has happened MANY MANY times before to his mother with previous pregnancies...

* MeaningfulName: ''Evan Treborn'' = "event reborn," alluding to Evan's [[spoiler:and his father's]] power. His name was originally going to be "Chris Treborn," but the writers feared the wrath of religious groups.

* MySkullRunnethOver: Thanks to MentalTimeTravel, the hero suffers mental instability, migraines, and institutionalization when the doctors find out "he has four lifetimes' worth of memories in his head!"

* OnlyKnownByTheirNickname: Evan's first roommate, "Thumper," is never called anything other than that.

* PsychicNosebleed: Evan starts to get nosebleeds after he has several blackouts. Each blackout (i.e. each use of his power) cause worse and worse damage to Evan's brain. This is caused by Evan's RippleEffectProofMemory kicking in and the memories being physically written into his brain and co-existing with the older sets. After the first couple of times, Evan fiddles with the past, he gets an MRI and the doctor notes that his brain has all the age-induced scarring of someone twice as old as him.

* SetWrongWhatWasOnceMadeRight: [[spoiler: In the director's cut ending, Evan decides to go back to when he was a fetus and strangle himself in order to undo the damage he's done.]]

* TheStoryThatNeverWas: [[spoiler: At the end, Evan decides that the only way he can stop screwing things up with his MentalTimeTravel is to jump back to before he was born, and strangle himself in his mother's womb; deleted scenes imply he wasn't even the first of his mother's children to go through this.]]

* TimeIsDangerous: The director's cut reveals that Evan suffers minor brain damage every time he majorly changes the past, resulting in severe migraines and nosebleeds as he gets the extra memories (often 20 years worth) burnt onto his existing ones. On the other hand, he realizes that repeated time travel might ultimately kill him, causing him to intentionally think through what he wants to change before each trip.
* TheTimeTravellersDilemma: The ending invokes this trope: [[spoiler:Evan goes back to the beginning, and ends his lifelong friendship/love (depending on the timeline in question) with Kayleigh before it starts. It works.]]

* UnkemptBeauty: Evan's reaction to seeing Kayleigh outside the diner in the first timeline. Especially apparent in this passage from the film's novelization. [[spoiler: Sadly, it doesn't end well.]]

** If you watch the director's cut, the Aesop could be interpreted as "Everything will be fine [[spoiler:[[HeroicSacrifice as long as you kill yourself]]."]]

* AnAesop: Similar to that of ''[[Film/TheTimeMachine2002 The Time Machine]]'' remake. Attempting to undo the mistakes of the past is futile; sometimes, you just have to accept things the way they are. Which is [[BrokenAesop broken]] by Evan's final decision by [[spoiler:making sure Kayleigh stays out of his life, which makes things all the better for everyone in the end]]. So yeah, it's more like the Aesop gets twisted into "You'll only be okay if you never find true love."

* BrokenAesop: The lesson that you can't possibly undo all of your past mistakes and that you have to accept them for what they are is broken by both of the endings, as Evan does precisely that by [[spoiler:removing himself from Kayleigh's life entirely. The real mistake he had to fix was meeting her in the first place (theatrical cut) or ''being born at all'' (director's cut)]].

* {{Foreshadowing}}: [[spoiler:You have no life-line. No soul. You were never meant to be.]]