A far smarter and more ambitious film than you might imagine, the original Butterfly Effect still didn't quite click.
It's a kind of time travel story about a young man looking to erase the sexual and physical abuse he suffered as a child, projecting himself back into the past to take over his body and change the course of his life.
It's the gravity of the stakes that make the film work as well as it does, and the emotional charge inherent in seeing somebody with deep scars wanting to take control of their past retroactively, to rewrite their fate in a way that they were powerless to affect as a victimised minor.
Heady stuff, but I doubt those ideas were what helped the first film draw almost $100 million at the US box office - this was 2004 and having ASHTON KUTCHER on the poster would have meant a great deal. Still - Kutcher was never better than in this film, and it's great that he pulled in an audience that might normally have been scared of the subject matter or genre.
The director's cut of the film works better than the softened theatrical version, and packs quite a powerful punch in its closing moments, but even that edit still leaves some room for improvement, so it seems like an odd, unexpected opportunity to read atthat ERIC BRESS, the first film's co-writer and co-director, is working on a screenplay for a remake.
There's no word on who might direct, but I'd love to see Bress get that job again too. He certainly knows the material.
J. MACKEYE GRUBER, the other writer-director on the original film, does not appear to be involved, at least as yet.
We'll keep you posted on this one. There's some real potential here.
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