Not the Ending I Remember

After getting the Boy down a few weekends ago, we watched the old Ashton Kutcher vehicle "The Butterfly Effect."

I remember thinking that it would be stupid when I saw commercials when it first came out, but when I watched it with Tony when he was on his DVD purchasing binge, I found it quite good. At least WAY better than I had been thinking go into it. Low expectations and all...

But in the fifteen or seixteen years since having seen it, I was taken aback again, like the first time, with the timing and the craziness of the story.

A kid named Evan has strange blackouts. He'll come to at certain times with no recollection of some previous set of minutes. As he gets older he keeps a journal about the blackouts, and finally when he reaches college, he studies and is a star-wunderkind in the discipline of brain-science and memory. This is Ashton Kutcher, the oldest iteration of Evan.

Three actors play the character Evan, and the first, the youngest, is a super dead-ringer for Kutcher, and the middle young-teen is a little off of the other two, but not so much that it jars a viewer.

After picking up a girl at a bar and taking her back to his room, she finds his old journals and asks him to read one. It has to do with a traumatic event (of which there are plenty in this movie), and his vision starts to shimmer and it turns out he's transplanted back to the exact time of the event.

He thinks its just a vision, but it turns out that he can travel back to the moments in his life when he had blacked out and become himself again, with the knowledge of his older self.

He seeks out the main love interest from his childhood to get some information from that time, and it of course sends her down a terrible memory path, and she ends up killing herself.

The main lady actress, Amy Smart, dead after one scene a half hour into the movie. Now that's jarring. And bold.

Kutcher decides to actually try to do something in the past. When he comes to, his entire world has changed. The Butterfly Effect in action. Now he's a frat boy and with his childhood sweetie, Amy Smart again, only playing a fully different version of a character with the same name as the first one.

This reality ends badly, and Evan goes back to change things again, and then that one ends badly, and on and on it goes---Evan tries to fix things only to make them worse. Well, worse for some.

Then the movie ramps up to the end, and I was waiting and waiting for the ending I saw originally, only for it to end completely differently.

"What the hell is this?" I shouted at my television.

They pass on the street, nearly strangers, seven years after the college time block? They pass on the street like ships in the night?

The ending I saw was the Director's Cut, apparently, and I found it a more satisfying completion of the story it seemed like they were trying to tell, if it was far more sad and realistic.

Anyway, I would recommend "The Butterfly Effect," but strongly suggest the Director's Cut. If you can only find the the Netflix offer with the theatrical ending, so be it. This movie is ambitious and original, and Ashton Kutcher is, frankly, pretty great as Evan.

All the actors are really solid, and Amy Smart is awesome as different iterations of the same character.