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"The Butterfly Effect" is a thriller about 20-year-old Evan Treborn (Ashton Kutcher), an extremely bright college student who suffered from blackouts as a child. When he was seven, his mother found him standing in the kitchen doorway with a butcher knife, but he cannot remember why he was there. Another time, he finger-painted "Kill me before it's too late" but is unable to recall doing so. His mother is obsessive-compulsive, while has father, who went completely mad, had similar memory losses, so Evan's doctors instructed him to keep a daily journal to keep his memory exercised. But one day he brings a young lady back to his dorm room and gets drunk before reading some of the old journals. He passes out and dreams about what he was reading and after he wakes up, he realizes that he can relive and even change the past. He returns back in time, occupies his childhood body and alters history, but when he returns to the present, he learns that the world has undergone some unexpected and chilling changes. Subsequent efforts to correct the situation by traveling back in time only make the situation worse.
Debut directors Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber wrote the screenplay for this film, as well as the one for the similarly themed Final Destination 2. They describe the film as having a premise like Back to the Future, but with heavier plot elements including pedophilia, prison rape and kiddie porn. The script was so dark that it took the duo quite a while to get the project greenlighted. According to Gruber, it was "really frustrating because the people who were in love with it most, the ones who kept saying, ‘We must get this made!’ were all the younger execs. And the older execs– the ones with the power of the pen– were saying, ‘Uh, I don’t know about this.’" With the film's star Ashton Kutcher being best known for his comedic roles in the Fox TV series That '70s Show, as well as the light fare film comedies Dude, Where's My Car? and Just Married, it remains to be seen how audiences will react to his playing a serious role in a dark film. Production began on June 3, 2002 in Vancouver on a budget of about $13 million and wrapped on July 31, 2002.
The Butterfly Effect takes its name from a principle of the Chaos Theory, which states that a minute event in one part of the world can cause substantial disruptions in another part because the subsequent consequences build dynamically. A popular example is that the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil could cause a tornado in Texas a week later. The Butterfly Effect is somewhat similar to the Domino Effect, except that it amplifies the initial condition in a manner which becomes unpredictable over time. The Butterfly Effect is most commonly associated with weather forecasting, where meteorologists have used supercomputers to develop models that predict likely scenarios. However, the effect has also been used in numerous other applications, including animal populations, chemical reactions and electronics. Much of the early work in the field was done by American meteorologist Edward N. Lorenz, who in 1963 discovered chaotic behavior in a computer study of the weather.
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