January 24, 2004

• My sister and I went to see "The Butterfly Effect" last night.  I felt like an idiot when I was saying the title of the movie to the ticket booth lady.  I was like, "One for the butterfy efflect...err....butterly....butterfly effect."  Heh, I laughed at myself, but she was eh, unaffected.  Maybe she had a long day.  Oh well.  Anyway, that was such a great movie.  Better than I thought.  *MAJOR SPOILER ALERT AHEAD* By the trailers, I thought it was originally supposed to be about just him wanting to save his gf all the time, like it was just about him and her. But actually, it involved more than that.  Granted, she was his primary focus for most of the movie, but she wasn't the only one triggering his desire to go back and fix things.  Whew, there were some sad and depressing and disturbing scenes in there, much of it involving children.  Pfft, this one guy sitting behind us must have felt incredibly stupid for what he said during this one scene that involved a man wanting to film children.  Anyway, the little girl in the scene was like, "Are we gonna make a video?"  And then the man behind us was like, "I wanna make a porno!" He said it with a tone of a little girl.  Then a few seconds later in the movie, it showed the two kids without their shirts on.  Well obviously the scene was supposed to be very dramatic to show the severity of how disturbed the kids ended up being.  Anyway, the guy's gf was like "See that's why you should shut the hell up."  And he's like, "I had no idea it was actually going to happen."  This was all being whispered behind us.  He kept his mouth shut the rest of the time. 

  
  

  Anyway, it so sucked how every time Ashton's character tried to fix something, he ends up screwing something ELSE up.  As I said before, most of his focus was on the girl that he loved, though grrrr, I can't remember where it started...ohhhh, yes.  She eventually killed herself a bit after he contacted her again after 7 years of being away from her.  He moved away at age 13.  Heh, the story is quite complex.  He always had a thing for her, and she did for him.  He, her, her brother, and another friend hung out all the time, grew up together, and were rebels together.  Her brother though (a grrrr character!!) was a major cause of much of the problems.  Her father was sexually abusive and, along with her brother, was physically abusive as well to her.  So her brother had a majorly bad temper, very controlling, but also very, sometimes violently, protective, and ashton's character (younger version) was always trying to protect her too.  But anyway, he always had blackouts (memory loss) growing up and could never remember major situations that he went through with the kids.  Blah, it'd take too long to say every situation that happened.  Eventually, his mom said that they're moving, and Ashton's character writes a note saying, "I'll come back for you" to show to the girl. Well, he doesn't come back for 7 years, and the only thing that makes him come back is when his memory starts to return to him from those mutiple events.  He finds her again, inadvertently reminds her of her troublesome past by trying to remember his own, and causes her to kill herself.  So anyway, he tries to fix that by reinserting himself into his boyhood shoes and telling her father not to abuse her, and to discipline her brother more, since the bro learned violence towards the sis through his father.  So that eventually fixed things for HER, but not for her bro, who was then the new recipient of the father's abuse.  (Discipline the son...get it?) And when he tries to fix THAT for her future self's sake, he again messes something ELSE up.   

  
  

  Man, it'd take forever to explain each and every event, so I'll just hop to the ending, which was rather original and different and the most intersting.  I really liked it.  He loved her so much, that in the end, his final choice of event to go back and fix was to not even get to know her at all, to not even be in her life, because he eventually realized that it was his presence that brought so much pain to her.  Oh of course he didn't intend it be that way, however.  But how did he reach that conclusion?  Because in one of the new futures he created by his past interventions, she told him that he was the first person she ever truly cared about, and that he was the only reason that she chose to live with her father instead of her mother when they separated.  She didn't want to be away from Ashton's character, even though she hated her father.  But since she cared about Ashton's character so much, she chose to stay with her father, and her bro did too, who, if memory serves, stuck by his sister's side always.  So Ashton decides to go back to the day he first met her at the age of 7 for his birthday party, and he whispers in her ear, "Stay away from me forever or I'll kill you and your family."   The little girl gets very scared, and runs to her mom.  So yep, in conclusion, he became a symbol of fear for her, and hence, she didn't care about him at all, which caused her to desire to live with her mom instead of her dad....her AND her bro.  That means that the kids didn't grow up with the abusive father and hence, didn't have a tramatic childhood.  That was the final event Ashton changed.  He gave up her presence in his life for her own sake, even if he himself wanted her there so badly.  It was kind of sad that they didn't end up together, even though they did pass by each other on the streets in the city at the end of the movie, but eh, I still enjoyed the movie as a whole.  I could have SO done without the stupid sex scenes though.  Ugh.

  • 7:26 am
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