Analysis Of Thriller - The Butterfly Effect

The Butterfly Effect is a famous psychological thriller that succeeds in many ways at keeping viewers entertained with a serious of mysterious scenes that bring suspense and tension upon the audience, making them sit on the edge of their seats. The Butterfly Effect is based around a boy called Evan, who throughout the film audience sees at various different stages of his life. Evan suffers from black-outs which cause him to forget certain, mostly traumatic events in his life; the blackouts are said to be stress related.

As teenage Evan takes a girl back to his dorm, he finds a collection of his old journals which he had written in as a child and beyond; Evan starts to recall the events to the girl and finds he can travel back in time and finds out previously hidden information and potentially redo all of the events in the journal account. As he goes through his accounts, he finds many different scenarios once he has changed his events, and he comes back into several alternative futures including a student, a prisoner and lastly an amputee. Each of the changes he makes to the events are an attempt to save (including saving her from being molested by her pedophile father) and win over his childhood sweetheart Kayleigh. All of these attempts seem to come with a negative consequence so he is forced to change some events more than once.

The confusion of memories in Evans brain cause him to have frequent nosebleeds throughout the film which leads to the diagnosis of brain damage later in the film. In several consequences from changing his past, he hurts many of his loved ones along the way, which he soon comes to realise. During the end of the film, Evan decides that the best thing to do is to go back to the time he met Kayleigh and scare her away, that way she will never be a part of his future life which does lead to him saving her life. He burns all of his memories and journals to destroy the evidence of ever meeting her. In the end scene we see Evan and Kayleigh pass in the street, they acknowledge each other but neither speaks.

The film is a successful thriller as it hits the expectations of what a thriller is. The blackouts are mysterious and the audience wish to know how he is going to change them and whether the change will bring good or bad consequences. The audience wonder also if Evan is ever going to succeed in saving Kayleigh and end up being with her. The effect of moving forwards and backwards in time ensure that many different events unfold, which the audience is anxious to follow until the end.

The Butterfly Effect Trailer