The Butterfly Effect

It was a Sunday afternoon, after a three hour long and exhaustive exam I came back home ate a candy bar and lied down. Then I decided to chill by watching a movie. The pick was the 2004 flick "The Butterfly Effect". Let me first tell you about the movie as quick as possible then I will try to explain what I liked about the movie.

Movie starts with a note from 'Chaos Theory', stating that even a flap of butterfly has the power to cause tornado halfway around the world ( sounds very ridiculous, I know). The movie dwells over some key incidents in the life of the protagonist, Evan, and how he tries to achieve all by fixing or manipulating his past. Evan stays with his mom as his dad is admitted to a mental institution. Evan's friend circle consists of three folks viz. Kaylee ( his love interest), Tommy ( Kaylee's bro, one of the antagonists. Kaylee and Tommy's father being the other, as the Paedophile) and Lenny. Since his childhood, Evan suffers from periodic blackouts, these blackouts are very strange as during such times he is totally normal but devoid of any memory for that particular period. Evan has a habit of maintaining his daily journals and apparently after every blackout he scribbles his feelings in his journal.

Evan's childhood and teenage had very few sweet memories. Incidents like him and Kayley being sexually molested, killing of his pet Crockett by Tommy and an accident in which Evan and his friends get their neighbour and child killed, are some of the most important and defining moments of his life. I guess, the only good thing that happened in his life is his friend Kaylee. But circumstances grew bad and eventually Evan and his mom had to move to another city to make a new life. Few years later, Evan ends up as an A grade student in his college and is happy with his calm life. But not Kaylee, who now works as a waiter in a suburban restaurant. Evan wants to fix this, he wants a better life for Kaylee and for himself. The movie takes turn when Evan discovers that he has the ability to go back to the past, exactly to the time of one of his blackouts. The journals plays critical role in this case as he uses them as time tags. Not only he can time travel back but also can take decisions which can change the course of his, his family's and friend's life, just by taking better course of action during the blackout moments. With his new found ability he now tries to fix everything. As he fixes one wrongdoing something else bad emerges, he repeats his quest many a times to fix everything in his life and his surroundings. But never manages to get all of them right. So how does the movie ends?

This movies has got more than one versions with different ending, the one which I watched ended a bit optimistically. It ends like this: going back to his fifth birth day party, Evan manages to scare Kaylee away by threatening her and her family. The climax shows Evan happy with his friend Lenny but without his love Kaylee, not sure what happened to his mom. ( To know more about the movie click here, trust me it's not spam or viral, it's wiki)

What's interesting in this movie? Well it is the 'chaos theory', it sounds very stupid but I find some sense in it. May be because I don't believe in destiny; what I believe in is the power of present, power of you being in control of present. I think, like Evan all of us wish to undo or change something in and/or around our life. What most of us will wish for, is a life which is better than the current one; but the fallacy in such yearning is that we the human being can't be satiated. If we are blessed with good we will ask for better and if we get something better we will yearn for more and eventually die doing so. Many of us would even dream to have the ability to go back to past, like Evan, and get things changed. Even I would love to do that to check out the chaos theory, but I also understand that won't guaranty that things will turn out for better, it might be worse. Sometimes, we need to carry on with our mistakes or carry somebody else's mistakes as an inseparable burden. We can't get everything totally under our control. Just imagine of getting rid of the worst part of your life, will that make everything else remain same or go better? Well I don't think so, all our actions will have some effect, however small, on us and our surrounding which eventually have significant implications. And our life being full of such actions and reactions, mistakes and mishaps are bound to happen. Even if you try to make sure everything goes right, may be I or somebody else will do something which inadvertently, may be advertently too, will effect you negatively. Moreover, life without mistakes and unwanted situations would be like eating a black forest day in and day out. You will eventually get cloyed by the goodness of life.

The wise tortoise ( quote from the movie Kung Fu Panda) said "Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the present". So go ahead, learn from history, crack the mystery and voila ... you got your present, the present of your life.

Merry Christmas!