If he can go back to the same memory twice why can't he go back and do basically the same thing with something different to change the future. He could have gone back to the blackout during the filming of a kiddy porn and addressed the problem that came about as the result of what he did last time.
Except that after the explosives incident he had neither the journals nor photos to use to bring him back as the journal writing started after that blackout. Though he couldn't have rectified the brother's abuse then after the "jail bird" reality and thus saved a lot of grief...
And considering he can only go back in time by reading journals or looking at photos of events during his blackouts, assuming this is all based on him remembering things like they're actually happening again, how does using some old home movie of his mother's pregnancy and/or birth of him bring him back to that moment at such an age our brains don't develop enough to store such memories?
Exactly. Evan can go back where he DOESN'T have memories of the events. Thus, he can get back to the point where baby Evan was in the womb.
Actually the human brain is the first thing to develop and is essentially fully formed in the first month after conception, though it continues to grow. Given how far along his mother is shown to be pregnant, he could go back to that point.
It's also worth noting that throughout the film, his father's use of polaroids and his use of a diary, the mechanics of their form of time travel seems to be more based around visualisation of where they want to go, than actual memory itself. The video also worked because of this.
His exponentially increasing brain damage as he figures out how his "gift" works can't have helped.
He pretty much uses those recordings as a time portal.
In some timelines, he didn't have all his journals, like when he was in jail, so he didn't have the option to go back to the kiddy porn scene. Also, he focused on helping Lenny. Preventing the kiddie porn doesn't prevent the dynamite that traumatizes Lenny or blows off Evan's arms. When he finally did go back to the kiddie porn scene, he was too focused on getting rid of the dynamite to give the father a moral lecture.
Given that his two older siblings committed suicide in the womb too, this means film material exists of all three pregnancies. Bit odd, that the father would be filming every single time, and act all joyous about it the third time around, after two stillbirths. What if he was doing this on purpose, so he'd have the opportunity to travel back to that moment in time? Or even cause he was planning for his children to be able to commit suicide? Alternatively: maybe his older siblings got hold of ultrasound pictures for their suicides.
The theatrical ending is much better than the one in the director's cut. And here's why. In the theatrical cut, Evan goes back to when he first met Kayleigh and creeps her out so that she'll never be near him again. As a result, Kayleigh and her brother go to live with their mother. As a result, the awful childhood memories involving Evan and them never happened. However, Evan probably became friends with Lenny still, which explains why the two are still friends and sharing a dorm room at college. Now, let's think about the director's cut. Evan goes back to when he was in his mother's womb, and asphyxiates himself with the umbilical cord. As a result, he was never born, and therefore any and all interactions he has lived never happened. That includes Kayleigh and Tommy. This means that Kayleigh was never creeped out by Evan that she will leave with her mother. So, she stays with her father... and thus, the child pornography event still could have happened. Along with all the emotional scarring caused by it to Tommy. Maybe this saved them some of the more scarring childhood experiences (if Evan was the one to become friends with Lenny first, and introduced him to Kayleigh and Tommy, then with Evan never born, Lenny maybe has never met them, and thus all incidents with Lenny involved in some way never happened. It still doubles as Fridge Horror when you realize that the child pornography event has big odds to have happened still.
You've got it backwards. It's not that Kayleigh only left because she was creeped out by Evan. She was going to leave anyway—what happened was in the original timeline, she stayed because she liked Evan and wanted to be near him. If there's no Evan, there's no reason for her to stay.
Evan's full name is Evan Treborne. - -'Event Reborn'
It is not only that if he was never born none of it (the retrocausality) could ever have happened: but if the blackouts always happened, especially the first two i.e. the one in the kitchen and the one in kindergarten, then he always went back, and the whole time travel series was just waiting to happen.
It is heavily implied that Evan's dad went through the same time traveling experiences Evan did. So it makes you wonder what crap he had to go through that made him so mentally unstable?
Not forgetting Evan's grandfather was also mentally ill, probably with the same condition.
If you really look at it Kayleigh's dad came off as a huge Karma Houdini. Ok sure in the end Kayleigh is saved from her dad and gets to live a normal and happy life but it doesn't change the fact that her dad has never been caught or arrested for his crimes and there is a strong possibility that he's still making child pornography but instead of Evan and Kayleigh it's other children from the neighborhood.
Evan's mother had experienced two pregnancy failures before he was born. In the Director's Cut, Evan strangles himself in the womb in order to never be born. Makes you wonder whether the first two failed pregnancies were the result of similar events.
This was almost certainly the case. While Evan is killing himself, they have a flash-forward showing all the changes, and one of those changes is Evan's mum's quote about having 2 stillbirths being changed to 3 stillbirths.
Who can say how many generations this has gone on, or how many similarly stillborn siblings Evan's father has.
Before the basement scene, Kayleigh's father tells Evan that he will be the star. To this, Tommy says "I thought I was the star". This implies that originally, that scene would have been between Kayleigh and Tommy. And who knows how many times it happened before.
Kayleigh isn't traumatized in those timelines where the scene was prevented. And she mentions her dad "only had the camera for a day and then gave it back". So it looks like it was the first and last time this ever happened.
If Evan has children (male children specifically, as apparently only they can carry on the curse) the curse will continue. He better sterilize himself.
Here's a fun what-if (almost a plot for a fanfiction actually): add into the movie that, in one of the timelines, Evan fathered a son, who was stillborn with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. When Evan finally commits prenatal suicide in the end, he realizes that his son who existed in that timeline had done the same thing to himself.
Imagine if Evan's attempt at strangling himself in the womb hadn't been completely successful, and he was just born severely disabled. Paralyzed, and/or mentally challenged. And now he watches the whole crapsack world unfold (his mom probably would have suffered from the disability somehow) and can't do anything to stop it, and any time he travels back to, he already has the disabilities.
Evan doesn't remember his blackouts. Imagine what that meant for the time he blew himself up. He'd wake up a quadruple amputee and not remember how it happened.
The fact of the theatrical release ending seems to make the director's cut ending horrifyingly unnecessary. If Evan can achieve the same outcome simply by being mean to Kayleigh, then him dying is basically pointless and for nothing.
The Theatrical Cut does kinda "cheat" in allowing Evan to travel once more, since (even in it) the Asylum's doctor says his mind is SO broken due to all the accumulated timelines in his head, one more change might kill Evan. It is, in any case, a desperate move, brought on by the (deleted) reveal that his mom's 2 previous babies were unborn, and thus Evan's only choice was the same one they made: killing themselves in the womb. Time was also running short since the security guards were after him and probably would have confiscated any material he could have used to time travel, so (besides his determination to follow through with his suicide) he probably didn't have time to ponder or analyze the possibility of a softer reboot.
