Chaos Theory

Since the 1960’s, there has been a theory that has continuously baffled scientists all over the world. It goes something like “Something as seemingly small and insignificant as the flapping of a butterfly’s wing today may cause a string of events leading to a tornado halfway around the world sometime in the future”, this butterfly effect is more commonly known as the Chaos Theory.

The Chaos Theory is the underlying theme of the latest movie from the team-up of Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber (same tandem who wrote the script for the movie “Final Destination 2”), which is interestingly enough, entitled "the Butterfly Effect". The movie tries to show that an action that we do today, no matter how small, may have a huge effect in how the future turns out. Or working backwards, if we could go back in time and change even a small detail from our past, it may entirely change the present.

In the movie, Ashton Kutcher (from the hit TV series “That 70’s show”) plays the lead role of Evan. When Evan was a child (until his early teens), he suffered from having several blackouts, from where he is not able to recall anything that happened. When he grew up, he discovers that by reading his past journals (which he started writing when the doctor suggested that this might help him with his blackout problem), he is able to travel back in time and see the “missing pieces” that he was not able to recall during those blackout moments. Not only that, Evan also discovers that he can change the details of the past to alter the present. Armed with this idea, he then tries to alter the past to prevent his childhood sweetheart, Kayleigh (played by Amy Smart, from another hit TV series, “Felicity”), from committing suicide. At first, this turns out pretty well as he finds that in the new timeline that resulted from his interference, he and Kayleigh are happy together. Unfortunately, this bliss turns out to be short-lived as an unwanted effect from his timeline interference ends their relationship. With that debacle, Evan then finds himself continuously going back through time hoping to set things right, but instead finds that things are getting worse with his every trip back in time.

As appealing as it is, the plot is not really original. The idea of traveling back in time and creating alternate timelines have already been explored in movies like The Back to the Future Trilogy, Contact, and many others. Not to be outdone, even Television has played around with this idea in shows like Quantum Leap, Star Trek, etc. Hey, I even saw the alternate timeline storyline in animated shows like X-Men (episodes with Bishop and Forge), The Simpson’s (where Homer swats a fly in the dinosaur era and finds that this has a huge effect 65 million years later), and Justice League (where our superheroes needed to go back to World War 2 to set things back to normal).

Anyway, fans of suspense thrillers will probably find themselves liking “the Butterfly Effect” as well, so you might want to catch it at a cinema near you. The movie opened just last week here in Metro Manila, which means you still have plenty of time to watch it in the big screen.

Hmmmm makes me wonder what difference the writing of this particular journal entry will make in the next decade or so.