March 27, 2004
a whirl of what ifs
i have a list of the last five movies i've seen (see right side of this blog), and i rated the butterfly effect with a 92 out of a perfect 100. i reconsidered it, thinking it might be a little too high, but... nah. i thought the grade was fine as it was. of course, as experience would dictate it, critics disagreed with me, even stating that the movie was "a bad-movie-lover's heaven, and a good-movie-lover's hell." i guess i'm a bad-movie-lover. tsk, tsk. poor me.
the thing about movies which critics highly acclaim is this: they're good, no doubt about it, but they fail to bring out the more tumultuous emotions in me. yes, they make me smile. yes, they make me sad. yes, they make me widen my eyes in pleasant surprise. but they don't make me pierce my sides in laughter. they don't make me weep in overwhelming sadness. they don't make my jaw drop in awe. (of course, given that this is a personal rule, it also has personal exceptions.)
the butterfly effect made my jaw drop in awe. it was the very idea of changing one's past that pulled me in. i have always been a sucker for movies, television shows, and books which play with the idea of what-ifs and what-nots (sliding doors, sliders, choose your own adventure series) and the butterfly effect is a kick-ass, straight-in-your-face whirl of what-if scenarios. it portrays the reality and gravity of regret, grief and loss in an over-the-top, yet strangely sensible manner. if you had the power to change your past and save your loved ones, wouldn't you do it? wouldn't it make sense? of course, the lead, evan treborn (ashton kutcher), finds out that changing the past may have devastating effects on the future. he learns, as the film's slogan would have it, that to change one thing is to change everything.
one of the critiques critics had for the film was its obscenely genuine cruelty. i would not go into details here (to prevent spoiling those who not yet watched the film), but let it suffice to say that indeed, the film was cruel. but that's the environment the film was working on. the film would not have had such an effect on me if the cruelty was to be taken out of it. i would not have cringed in fear, i would not have choked in dismay, i would not have felt the pain in each of the characters. in fact, the different dimensions (i cannot find any other word for it) evan treborn went through would have seemed ordinary if not for the genuine cruelty which was present in each and every one. i thought that cruelty was the driving force that pushed evan treborn to begin moving back in time in the first place.
another critique is that there were too much erratic movements in the film. evan treborn kept coming back in the past like a raving lunatic. well, i didn't want to reduce such movements in time, because i truly enjoyed these scenes where i felt like i was being transported back in time with evan treborn. besides, i believe there is logical reason why he kept coming back. he wanted to rectify the mistakes he made in the past. of course, he should have realized that everything just wasn't coming together the way he planned, that in fact everything seemed to be going worse. but remember that the more he changed the past, the more wacky his future went, and the more desperate he became. he was then trapped in a vicious cycle that threatened to destroy his mind. in that state, it was difficult for him to think steadily, especially now that so much had been sacrificed, and yet so much remained at stake.
of course, i'm not all roses about the film. if i was, i would have given it a perfect mark. like all critics, i found that ashton kutcher, the host of punk'd, was a poor casting choice. everytime he appeared on-screen i half-expected him to be punking one of his co-actors. hee. i also remember snickering at his acting at some parts. well, i thought he didn't really try to create a new facet for the character, one that would remove him from the "comic" mold he placed himself into. other than ashton kutcher, though, i thought there was fine acting among the cast, especially among the child actors (watch out for evil, evil, evil tommy).
all in all, i say that it was a great film. one of the best indicators of this was that after jeland and i watched the film, we were conversing about the regrets we had in our lives, whether we would change them, and how we would change them. i realized, in the course of our conversation, that it didn't really matter. we may ask all the what-ifs we want, we may even be able to change the course of events in our lives, but in the end, we are all going meet some finality. what really matters is to whom we made the choices in our lives, and whether we stood by them or not.
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