The Butterfly Effect/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Common Knowledge: For some reason, when people mention the movie on the Internet, they tend to forget the theatrical ending and only remember the director's cut where the main character kills himself in the womb.
  • Complete Monster: Tommy and Kayleigh's father.
    • Tommy himself.
  • Critical Dissonance: The movie has a 33 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes, but a 7.6 score on IMDB and was a massive box office success for its small budget.
  • Fetish Retardant: The glass table sex scene in Revelations.
  • Fridge Logic: If he can go back to the same memory twice why can't he go back and do basically the same thing with something different to change the future. He could have gone back to the blackout during the filming of a kiddy porn and addressed the problem that came about as the result of what he did last time.
    • Except that the explosives incident he had neither the journals nor photos to use to bring him back as the journal writing started after that blackout. Though he couldn't have rectified the brother's abuse then after the "jail bird" reality and thus saved a lot of grief...
    • And considering he can only go back in time by reading journals or looking at photos of events during his blackouts, assuming this is all based on him remembering things like they're actually happening again, how does using some old home movie of his mother's pregnancy and/or birth of him bring him back to that moment at such an age our brains don't develop enough to store such memories?
      • Exactly. Evans can go back where he DOESN'T have memories of the events. Thus, he can get back to the point where baby Evan was in the womb.
  • Moral Event Horizon: Tommy arguably crosses this when he sets Evan's dog on fire.
  • Narm: Any time something particularly horrible happens to Ashton Kutcher.
    • Or when the tubby little Obviously Evil kid beats up a guy twice his size in the cinema.
    • Or when Evan accidentally crushes the granola bar.
    • Or the deadly serious use of the word "fuckbag" to defuse a child abuse situation.
    • Or the reaction of the cellmate to the magically appearing "stigmata".
    • Or the...Christ, the whole film.
    • "Oh Mrs Bosweeelllll..."
  • Nightmare Retardant: The scene where Evan wakes up with no arms.
    • Also counts as hideously painful Narm in some scenes. Sweet Jesus, the granola bar thing.
  • So Bad It's Good: Because of the presence of Ashton Kutcher, the movie is potential Mystery Science Theater 3000 gold.
  • Vindicated by History: Peter Bradshaw, movie critic for British's newspaper The Guardian, admitted in a retrospective in 2016 that a lot of critics, including himself, were too harsh on the movie thanks to the presence of Ashton Kutcher, whose public view during the movie's release was bad; to be more exact, he was seen as "uncool".
  • The Woobie: Evan's girlfriend and Evan himself.