Emma Nye

The Butterfly Effect

The film opens with a medical patient, Evan who is featured to be breaking into a doctor's office at night. The guards are alerted by an alarm and Evan is aware that they are looking for him.Instinctively, he baracades the door with a sofa, in order to keep the security guards out.
The film transfers back in time where the audience meet the young 8 year old Evan Treborn. Evan is raised alone by his mother, a nurse. Evan has also started experiencing blackouts where he does not remember what has happened. The narrative then follows Evan's life along with three of his friends, Kayleigh Miller, her brother Tommy, and Lenny.
Evan is dropped off at his friend Kayleigh's house, when he is 8 years old. The audience begin to make assumptions about her dad as this point, due to he has just picked up a new video camera, and he wants to make a home movie with Kayleigh and Evan. At this point, Evan blacks out, and he finds himself naked with Kayleigh in the basement of the house. Mr. Miller has just finished making a movie, but Evan doesn't remember what has just happened.

Evan's mother is concerned about his blackouts and takes him to see a doctor at a psychiatric institution. The doctor notes that Evan's blackouts do not seem to have a physical cause. He recommends that Evan keep a journal as treatment (important).
We find out that Evan's father is in a psychiatric institution - they have never met, they suffer with the same "butterfly effect". Evan's doctor theorizes that his blackouts may also be related to him not having a father figure, and recommends that they meet in a controlled environment. They meet, but then Evan blacks out and awakens to see his father strangling him. The guards tear him off of Evan, beat him with a truncheon and kills him.
Another key scene is when Evan is at 13 years old, we see Evan and his friends smoking and rummaging in the Millers' basement. Tommy (Kayleigh's brother) finds a stick of dynamite, and they decide to use it for a prank. They light it and put it into a mailbox of a neighbour's house, and wait in the woods by the house for it to explode. Evan blacks out, and then he finds them all running in a panic through woods dragging Lenny with them, who appears to be in a tramautic state. Evan has no idea what has just happened, and Lenny has to go to the hospital for psychological treatment.
13 years old now, Lenny has come back from the hospital. Evan and Kayleigh go to visit Lenny, and together they wander into a junkyard, where they see some smoke. They happen upon Tommy, who has tied up Evan's dog in a bag, and soaked it with gasoline, and is preparing to light it on fire. Evan tries to stop Tommy, but Tommy picks up a stick and accidentally hits Kayleigh as he swings at Evan. Evan blacks out, and wakes up to find himself and Kayleigh bloodied, Lenny unhurt, and a burn't out bag with the remains of his dog.

They go out to celebrate after one of Evan's exams, the occasion being that he has not had a blackout in 7 years. They go to a bar where Evan brings a girl back to his dorm. She finds his stash of journals which he apparently has kept all through the years. She begs and requests that he reads her a passage out of one of the journals. Something very strange when he reads a part that approaches one of his blackouts as a kid.

Later on, Evan is not sure whether this is a real memory, due to he is experiencing black outs again so he goes to visit Lenny. The adult Lenny is a very psychologically disturbed. Evan asks whether he remembers the time that they found Tommy in the junkyard. Lenny barks out what Tommy had said "If you do anything, I'll kill your mother in her sleep!"
Evan realizes that reading the entry leading up to a blackout, he can go back in time to that moment. Intrigued, he reads another passage in one of his journals. He is thrown back to the him and his friends waiting for the mailbox to explode. Lost in the moment, the cigarette falls out of his mouth (a different scenario to the first happening of this event) and onto his shirt, burning him. A car pulls into the driveway of the house, and a mother and baby get out. Before heading inside, the mother decides to pick up the mail. The four watch in horror as the mother and child go to the mailbox and it explodes. While Evan, Kayleigh and Tommy run from the scene, Lenny is totally stunned and traumatized and has to be dragged away from the scene.
He returns back in present time, Evan finds that he has a new scar from the cigarette burn that he didn't have before. From this, he comes to the realisation of what happens in the past can happen differently, depending on his actions. However, he is hesitant to continue investigating where his repressed memories may lead. He goes back to visit Kayleigh, who he apparently has not seen since he moved away at 13. After she leaves her job working in a diner, he meets her and starts questioning her about the past. Kayleigh reveals that when her parents split up, she had a choice to live with her father, or with her mother who lived out of town. As they were childhood friends, she chose to live with her father as she didn't want to move away (important later). Evan then starts asking her about the time they made a movie with her father (a memory he has not revisited yet). She gets very upset, and he realizes that they were abused and forced to do a kiddie porn film, and she leaves him crying.

When Evan gets back to his dorm, he receives a message and learns that Kayleigh has killed herself. At this point he makes the active decision to go change the past. He reads the journal passage bringing him back to Episode 1 above. Kayleigh and Evan are in the Mr. Miller's basement with costumes on, the video camera is running. Mr. Miller instructs them to take off their clothes, but then Evan challenges Miller in an adult tone, saying that what he is doing will ruin his daughter's life and lead to her suicide. He adds that he should raise his daughter lovingly, and adds that he should discipline his son Tommy, as he is a sick person. In a hard to believe development, this seems to convince Miller, who seems genuinely contrite and promises to change his ways.

Evan wakes up in present time to find himself in bed with Kayleigh. He then has new memories flooding back into him, as he has changed how everything developed because of that one instance (sort of like Rufus Sewell in Dark City getting his past reprogrammed). Kayleigh grew up not being abused by her father, and snuck away to meet him when he moved away. They started dating, and are now in college together. She is in a sorority, and in a humorous development, he is a stereotypical frat boy.

We see that his relationships are totally different, for example he runs into his roommate Thumper from the original timeline, who understandably as a punk-goth type has nothing to do with frat boy Evan. But By the way, for the plot to work, Evan also retains all of his old memories of the alternate timeline.
Evan, Kayleigh and Lenny are just about to come upon Tommy. Evan realizes that they have to be prepared this time in order to change the past, so he picks up a shard of metal and gives it to Lenny, telling him to use it to "cut the rope" (to free the his dog from the bag). However, during the confrontation with Tommy, he changes things himself, and convinces Tommy not to kill the dog. Just as Tommy puts down the stick, he is stabbed by Lenny with the metal shard and killed.
Instead of watching the inevitable explosion, Evan runs out and shouts at the mother to get away from the mailbox. As he gets to the mailbox, it explodes and he is thrown back. Changing the fate out Lennys psychological disturbance.
Evan wakes up in the present, and finds that his roommate in college is apparently a very well-adjusted and social Lenny. The shock to the audience, is when they discover that Evan does not have any arms, as they were amputated due to the injuries from the explosion. Other things have changed as well, Kayleigh is Lenny's girlfriend, and Tommy is alive and well, and they are all still best friends. Though he feels sorry for himself, he sees that everybody else is happier. He tries to kill himself, but fails when Tommy saves him. He then visits his mother in the hospital, who is dying of lung cancer. Apparently, in this timeline his mother started smoking again as a result of the dynamite accident. This convinces him to try to change the past again.

He goes back and tries to kill too many birds with one stone. He grabs a candle, and the finds the stick of dynamite that is also in the basement. He tries to threaten Mr. Miller into not harming anyone, but this backfires, and he drops the lit stick of dynamite which explodes when Kayleigh picks it up.
Evan returns to the present as an institutionalized psychiatric patient. The incident involving Kayleigh's death led to a string of events culminating in Evan's present condition. As everything is wrong, and Kayleigh is dead, he has to try to change the past again. He storms in to see his doctor, and demands his journals. However, the doctor says that there are no journals. Rather, all of his memories are a delusional fabrication he has concocted as a result of his guilt over his role in Kayleigh's death. In this timeline, the chain of events he set off have resulted in him not keeping any journals. The doctor then comments that this is the same affliction that befell his father, and in the end his father kept asking to see an old photo album that never existed.
We see Evan sneaking around in the institution at night, breaking into the doctor's office (back to the very first scene of the movie). Barricaded in the office, as he finishes his note he starts playing a projector with one of his mother's old home videos.
Back in the present, he is with Lenny his roommate and asks "Where's Kayleigh?" to which Lenny replies "Who's Kayleigh?" Not suprisingly, they never became friends in this timeline. He goes back to the diner where Kayleigh was working in an earlier timeline, but she never worked there. Evidently she and her brother moved with their mother when their parents split up. Kayleigh, Tommy and Lenny have all turned out fine.. Although he is not with Kayleigh, this is one life that Evan can accept, and he burns the journals.