The Butterfly Effect is a 2004 American science fiction thriller film written and directed by Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber.

It stars Ashton Kutcher, Amy Smart, Eric Stoltz, William Lee Scott, Elden Henson, Logan Lerman, Ethan Suplee, and Melora Walters.

These traumas include being forced to create child pornography with Kayleigh by Tommy's father George, Evan nearly being strangled to death by his institutionalized father Jason before Jason is killed in front of him by guards, accidentally killing a mother and her infant daughter while playing with dynamite, and Tommy burning Evan's dog Crockett alive.

He comes back to a reality where he and Kayleigh are a happy couple in college, but discovers George ended up taking out all of his abusive tendencies on Tommy, who grew up to become even more violent and dangerous.

To save his mother and himself from this fate, Evan goes back to his childhood and prepares to discard the lit dynamite, but Kayleigh picks it up when it is smacked out of his hand by her father, and it explodes, killing her.

Evan awakens in a mental hospital and finds that his journals no longer exist and he has suffered irreversible brain damage due to the rigors of time travel.

After escaping the hospital staff and barricading himself in an office, Evan uses an old home movie to travel back to the day he first met Kayleigh.

He travels back to that moment and strangles himself in the womb with his umbilical cord so as to prevent the multi-generational curse from continuing, consistent with an added scene where a psychic palm reader tells Evan "you have no lifeline" and that he does "not belong to this world".

[6] Roger Ebert wrote that he "enjoyed The Butterfly Effect, up to a point" and that the "plot provides a showcase for acting talent, since the actors have to play characters who go through wild swings."

[7] Sean Axmaker of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer called it a "metaphysical mess", criticizing the film's mechanics for being "fuzzy at best and just plain sloppy the rest of the time".

[8] Mike Clark of USA Today also gave the film a negative review, stating, "Normally, such a premise comes off as either intriguing or silly, but the morbid subplots (there's prison sex, too) prevent Effect from becoming the unintentional howler it might otherwise be.

"[9] Additionally, Ty Burr of The Boston Globe went as far as saying, "whatever train-wreck pleasures you might locate here are spoiled by the vile acts the characters commit.

The DVD also includes two documentaries ("The Science and Psychology of the Chaos Theory" and "The History and Allure of Time Travel"), a trivia subtitle track, filmmaker commentary by directors Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, deleted and alternative scenes, and a short feature called "The Creative Process" among other things.

This sequel follows the life of a young man who journeys back in time in order to solve the mystery surrounding his high school girlfriend's death.