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'See You Yesterday' Review: The Time Travel Romp Takes On A Timely Twist

Ever since Back to the Future hit theaters in 1985, time travel has become, for lack of a better phrase, old news. Time travel and all of its quirks and reality-altering consequences have become a part of the cultural language, with even the casual moviegoer knowing what happens if you step on a butterfly in the past. But See You Yesterday , which comes from Spike Lee protégé Stefon Bristol , adds a fresh and timely twist to the well-worn time travel movie.

See You Yesterday follows CJ ( Eden Duncan-Smith ), a science prodigy who develops a time travel device with her best friend Sebastian ( Danté Crichlow ) for their school science fair. But their elation at inventing time travel is cut short when CJ's older brother Calvin (a wonderfully plaintive Brian Vaughn Bradley, Jr. ) is wrongfully killed by the police. Griefstricken, CJ convinces Sebastian to use to help her change the past with their new device, only to discover that tragedy is lurking around every corner.

At its most basic elevator pitch, See You Yesterday is Back to the Future meets Black Lives Matter. But to reduce the film just to that logline would do it a disservice. Bristol shows a remarkable ability to balance the film's serious themes with the lighthearted nature of the time travel romp, which the film adheres to pretty closely. CJ and Sebastian's time travel device is steampunk Spielberg-meets-Wes Anderson — it amounts essentially to a giant backpack with quirky round goggles and unwieldy wristwatch. See You Yesterday 's version of New York is one of warm, saturated colors, rich and vibrant neighborhoods, and friendly bodega owners. CJ and Sebastian's high school is so typical of a movie version of school that it almost comes of no shock when Michael J. Fox waltzes in for a cameo and a winking, "Great Scott!" This heightened and happy version of New York is central to See You Yesterday 's buoyant tone, which rarely clashes with the dark, modern-day elements that slowly creep in.

Up until two-thirds of the way through the film, the greatest danger CJ faces is her hostile ex-boyfriend, whose threats against her and Sebastian fall flat when her brother Calvin steps in to intercede. But there is an underlying tension that pervades the film that the bullish CJ is frustratingly insensitive to. Hot-headed and reckless, CJ is a fascinatingly unlikable protagonist. As played by a fierce Duncan-Smith, CJ is prone to lashing out equally against her loved ones and her enemies — once to dangerous effect, when she protests against her brother's intervention with her ex on her behalf. Their yelling match attracts the attention of a nearby cop, and CJ ends up yelling at the cop while her brother crumples in compliance — a scene that becomes unbearably tense and a stark reminder that See You Yesterday is more than just a breezy time-travel adventure.

The film builds to a boiling point with the shooting of Calvin, who is killed when he is mistaken for a bodega robber by cops in pursuit. Bristol crafts a complex, airtight scenario leading up to the shooting, which he leaves offscreen, allowing the viewer to fill in the gaps. See You Yesterday is a film aware of the territory it's treading in. Its decision to leave the most devastating moments of violence offscreen isn't it shying away from issues of police brutality but approaching the issue from the perspective that the audience knows this is a part of life now. It's almost more harrowing in that regard, suggesting that police shootings are as much an inevitability as consequences are in time travel. In bringing this to the forefront, Bristol employs the 12 Monkeys concept of time travel more so than the Back to the Future idea — that nothing, no death is inevitable.

It's an alarmingly depressing notion that Bristol manages to convey without making See You Yesterday feel too bleak. CJ and Sebastian are a compelling duo, whose warm friendship drives the film even as CJ's impulsive actions end up inadvertently hurting Sebastian. And several supporting characters pop up to provide much-needed moments of levity, even if comic relief characters like Eduardo ( Johnathan Nieves ), a classmate of CJ and Sebastian's who nurses a crush on CJ, veer on the cartoonish side.

See You Yesterday is a powerful debut from Bristol, who proves a promising filmmaker well-deserving of mentor Spike Lee's support. See You Yesterday is a powerful and poignant film centered on a wonderfully flawed protagonist whose hard-earned lessons in this film leave a profound impact with the viewer long after the credits roll. /Film Rating: 8 out of 10

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The Meanest Time Travel Movie Ever Made, 20 Years Later

If ‘The Butterfly Effect’ is remembered for anything, it’s unrelenting cruelty. The thing is, it was almost even crueler.

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In the feverish final moments of The Butterfly Effect , Evan Treborn (Ashton Kutcher) escapes his psychiatric cell, turns on an old home video of his pregnant mother, and magically wormholes his way into her womb. It’s a sacrificial last resort. Over the course of this unrelenting psychological thriller, Evan’s time travel abilities have created numerous alternate realities with disastrous ripple effects for his friends and family. Ultimately, he concludes that killing himself is the only way to ensure that his loved ones survive.

Moments later, floating in his amniotic sac, Evan wraps his umbilical cord around his neck and flatlines.

Cue the credits.

Twenty years later, the movie’s writer-directors, Eric Bress and Jon Mackye Gruber, can’t exactly remember who came up with that horrifying and twisted fade to black. “I think it was your girlfriend,” Gruber tells Bress over a recent Zoom call. Either way, the sci-fi concept, a sort of “anti– It’s a Wonderful Life ,” as Bress describes it, was the first image that unlocked one of the bleakest, meanest time travel movies of all time. “I thought the idea was really cool,” Gruber says. “You’re young and you’re being a little punk rock, and at the end of the movie, the audience is gonna sit there and go, ‘Don’t talk to me. I need to absorb what I just saw . ’”

Loosely based on chaos theory—the idea that small actions can have unpredictable and extreme consequences— The Butterfly Effect is primarily a cinematic montage of worst-case scenarios. When a college-aged Evan discovers he can portal back to his traumatic adolescence and change the past, each of his well-intentioned alterations makes things worse for those around him. In various time lines, he’s confronted with pedophilia, fatal cancer, and animal abuse. In others, his girlfriend, Kayleigh, falls victim to drug addiction, while Evan commits manslaughter and goes to prison. At one point, he even becomes a paraplegic and nearly drowns himself. No matter how many times Evan returns to the past, everyone around him ends up miserable. His death by suicide tops off two hours of philosophical misery porn.

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Except audiences never saw that gut punch of an ending. Despite New Line Cinema’s initial interest in the filmmakers’ extremist sensibilities, the studio got cold feet and requested that Bress and Gruber sub in a more palatable finale. The pair eventually complied, removing the torturous miscarriage and shooting an open-ended conclusion in which Evan never befriends Kayleigh instead. When the movie debuted in theaters, the open-ended coda hit a different emotional note. “I was quite upset at the moment,” Gruber says. “I was so mentally attached to that baby ending.”

Today, the directors still have mixed feelings about it. The theatrical version, which scored big at the box office, offers a respite from the movie’s relentless pain and suffering. But the original ending, which was relegated to the director’s cut DVD, commits to Evan’s ultimate sacrifice and has since provoked ethical debates. Like their time-traveling protagonist, the filmmakers can’t help but imagine how things might have been different had the studio kept their vision two decades earlier. “I think the human mind is geared toward living in regret and what-if,” Bress says. “We’re kind of wired to do it.”

In the mid-1990s, Bress and Gruber were eager to break into Hollywood. Influenced by the decade’s indies like Clerks and Swingers , their scripts defied standard three-act structures and “went all over the place,” Bress says. But they struggled to turn heads: “We were sort of lazy writers who lived in a world of ‘Let’s reinvent the wheel over here in this loft.’”

One late night—while smoking weed—they began brainstorming about the past. At the time, Bress had been mulling over a traumatic experience he’d had with a friend. He wondered how his life might be different if he’d been able to reverse this bit of personal history. “We just played it out. ‘Well, if that had never happened, then we wouldn’t have met,’” he says. “It was just kind of fascinating to think that all these little decisions could have such a huge impact on life.” That’s when the baby ending formed, a climax that could be reverse engineered into a time-travel story. “We were still fighting the Hollywood system,” Bress says. “We just wanted it to be darker and grittier and really interesting.”

Soon, the two of them hashed out a script called Blackouts , a sci-fi drama about a kid who loses his memory at various traumatic points in his life—the moments his future self attempts to change. “We hadn’t structurally cracked the nut yet,” Gruber says. “But we thought there was something there.” The rough draft was so sinister—one scene featured an 8-year-old Evan blowing a guy’s head off with his dad’s shotgun—that it left their manager disgusted. “He was like, ‘You should not be doing this. This is not your thing,’” Gruber remembers. “He made us feel so bad about it, like it was a piece of shit.” The pair put it in a drawer. “We were kind of disappointed because we felt like, ‘Wow, there was something unique in there.’”

Two years later, a mutual friend landed them a sit-down with J.C. Spink and Chris Bender at Zide Entertainment. The two managers liked some of their scripts but asked whether the pair had anything else to share. “We’re like, ‘Well, we have this one thing, but we think it’s probably not very good …’” Gruber remembers. On a flight the next day, Bender couldn’t get over the final pages. “I distinctly remember reading the ending just before getting off the plane, and when I walked off, I called them right away,” Bender says. “I had never seen anything like that before. It’s such a disturbing idea.”

The pair’s dusty draft still needed work—the butterfly effect concept hadn’t been fully developed yet. “We really dove into the rules and logic and tried to make it all work,” Bender says. After Bress and Gruber filled in plot holes and fleshed out characters, they returned with a sanded-off script. But “there was no weight to any of the changes,” Bress says. “There was no real ride to go on.” In a sense, they overcorrected, practically pushing the story into lighthearted rom-com territory. “We wanted to make them like us. We thought maybe it was too dark our way,” Gruber says. “And then we had to realize the reason they brought us in is because they like the darkness.”

Back to the drawing board. Though both Bress and Gruber consider themselves “mischievous, not sadistic,” they also admittedly found disturbing things funny. Over the next month, they sat on their apartment floor and began thinking up the darkest, most dire outcomes and circumstances to push their protagonist over the edge. “It became patterns of just going back and forth and trying to have a progression,” Gruber says. “Each time we had to up the ante.” After tying up some loose ends with producer and writer Craig Perry, they began shopping their script around and taking meetings with various studios. “Everyone kept on saying, ‘It’s too complex, and it’s really dark, and I don’t know if there’s an audience for it,’” Gruber says.

In the face of rejection, Bress and Gruber eventually found a detour. New Line head Richard Brener was looking for writers for Final Destination 2 . He’d liked the Blackouts script and thought their sensibility might match a franchise all about killing people in eccentric ways. What are those baby-killer guys like? Brener thought. They seem to have the right temperament. The pair eventually wrote a formidable sequel and in 2002 convinced New Line to sign off on some speculative funding for their script, so long as they secured a major star. At the same time, Ashton Kutcher was looking to pivot away from comedy—what better way to do that than with a time travel movie in which his character shanks an inmate in the groin?

Shot in Vancouver on a tight schedule, The Butterfly Effect and its crew pushed things to their ethical limits. In one scene, Kayleigh’s brother traps a dog in a burlap bag, and it’s suggested that he sets the dog on fire. Gruber remembers his DP shaking his head in the midst of filming an animatronic dog inside the bag. “He goes, ‘This might be the worst thing I’ve ever shot in my career.’” In another scene , a firework explodes inside a mailbox, killing a mother and her baby. “There’s a close-up on the ground of the pacifier falling with flames on it,” Gruber says with a laugh. “There’s a couple of shots that we instinctively knew would never live in the movie, but we shot them anyway, just for our own sick amusement.”

Inspired by Requiem for a Dream and Trainspotting , the filmmakers quickly learned that their sense of humor didn’t exactly translate to the screen. Not everything would be as funny outside their on-set bubble. “Those final seconds are traumatizing,” Bress says of the firework bomb. “There is no joke—there’s no room for humor, no bandwidth for that at all.”

After watching the guys film an onslaught of cruelty, Bender began having second thoughts about the movie’s climactic sacrifice. He remembered what an older line producer told him at the start of filming. “He’s like, ‘I don’t understand why you guys want to make this movie. It seems so dark and without any hope at the end,’” Bender says. As a younger producer, he was thirsty for surprises and twist endings. But doubt was creeping in. “I remember feeling like, ‘You know, he’s not wrong.’”

Near the final days of production, Bress and Gruber started prepping for the finale. They knew that the actual strangling would take place on an ultrasound monitor, and that most of the shots inside the womb would rely on visual effects and a solemn score. Still, wanting to demonstrate Evan’s transference without being cheesy, they put out a casting call for a real newborn. As with some of the other dark scenes they had shot, things got a little awkward. “I remember the casting of the baby and wanting to make sure the baby looked fetus-like enough,” Bender says, “which is sort of a bizarre thing to be casting for.”

Eventually, they landed on a 2-week-old infant whose mother was so eager to have him on-screen that “it almost seems like she signed her baby up for SAG in the womb,” Gruber laughs. With just 20 minutes to work with, they put the baby on a lazy Susan that had been covered in a plain black cloth so that effects could be added in post. Then they draped a prosthetic umbilical cord near the baby’s throat. “The mother’s like, ‘You could put it really in there if you want,’” Gruber remembers with shock. “It was sort of scary.” But the biggest challenge was keeping their equipment dry. “The baby kept on peeing into the camera lens,” he says. “As much as we wanted it, Eric and I just felt uncomfortable.”

As the movie began wrapping up, New Line intervened. The studio had grown concerned about the ending and wanted some backup material in case audiences didn’t respond well. “I think Ashton almost didn’t want to do [the alternative ending]. He’s like, ‘Don’t even give them the option to sabotage your film,’” Gruber says. “Even [cinematographer] Matthew Leonetti said, ‘I joined this film because of that ending.’” But the first-time directors couldn’t sandbag their debut, so Bress and Gruber looked over the studio’s proposed script changes, thought up a few shot designs, and set up cameras downtown.

In the reimagined conclusion, Evan cuts ties with Kayleigh as a kid. The script then portals him back to college, where he learns everyone is unharmed. Eight years later, in New York, Evan is on the phone with his mother when he vaguely recognizes Kayleigh on the street. In the first ending, they pass each other, turn around briefly, and then go their separate ways. “He may not be in her life anymore, but she’s having a happy life,” Gruber says. “There’s resolution. It’s bittersweet, but he’s still honorable.”

But still, the studio wanted a few more options. On the next take, the directors set up the same preamble, but after the cut to New York, Evan walks by Kayleigh, pauses, and begins following her. The directors called it their “stalker version.” “We were definitely like, that is creepy ,” Bress says. “It might have come off as hopeful, like he’s giving it another shot. But the angles [looked like] he was following her down the road and sneaking up on her.”

The last take was narratively controversial: Instead of passing each other, Evan and Kayleigh stop to introduce themselves and agree to a cup of coffee. “I don’t even know why we shot that,” Bress says. “The one lesson in the film is stay out of her life. Let her live.” Ultimately, Gruber wasn’t too worried. “Eric and I were still convinced that the baby ending was living,” he says.

After a rough cut of the movie had been put together, New Line began screening the different endings for test audiences. Though the studio preferred the romantic meet-cute version, the ambiguous walk-by earned glowing reviews at the first screening. New Line was convinced enough to keep it. “They’re like, ‘It ain’t broke, why fix it?’” Gruber remembers. “We’re like, what about screening our ending? They go, ‘That’s why you’ve got DVD.’”

Gruber felt as if they’d lost their most valuable asset. The ending that had crystallized the movie—the ending that got Bender to hire them—wouldn’t hit the big screen. “It was heartbreaking for me and Eric,” Gruber says. “We wrote this when I was 25. We were like, ‘That’s just so much fucking better.’”

“It wasn’t a cop-out,” Bender says. “It was still true to the story we told. It was a choice he made. It just wasn’t as dark of a choice.”

When The Butterfly Effect premiered in theaters on January 23, 2004, the lighter ending didn’t prevent critics from scrutinizing its unstructured logic and nonstop cruelty. “There’s so much flashing forward and backward, so many spins of fate, so many chapters in the journals, that after a while I felt that I, as well as time, was being jerked around,” Roger Ebert wrote in his review. And yet audiences couldn’t get enough. The movie earned $96 million against its $13 million budget, its ambiguous ending prompting all kinds of theories. Did Kayleigh recognize him? Was she truly better off? Would Evan tempt fate and still try to get together again?

Two months later, the directors experienced the new ending’s power firsthand. Before the movie’s debut at the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival, a journalist warned Bress and Gruber that the audience would be raucous, screaming, and throwing objects at the screen. “I’m like, ‘This is gonna be a shit show, and I’ve invited my family,’” Gruber says. The two of them started drinking. However, around halfway through the movie, the crowd went dead silent, shushing anyone who raised their voice. “It dawns on me that ‘No, they’re really into the movie, and they don’t want anyone to fuck it up for them by yelling something stupid,’” Bress says. When Evan and Kayleigh eventually passed each other and the credits rolled, the filmmakers became rock stars. “There’s a fucking eruption, like a standing ovation,” Bress says. “People were reaching to find us and touch us. It’s like we’ve made the greatest film of all time.”

That summer, when the director’s cut DVD was released, people finally got the full Butterfly Effect experience. In addition to absorbing Evan’s devastating choice to kill himself, fans were drawn to a deleted scene in which Evan’s mother remarks that she’d had a few miscarriages before giving birth to him. Another dark and depressing wrinkle emerged: Did Evan have previous siblings who had similarly tried to alter the past and killed themselves like him? “How many other possible times has this come full circle before?” Bress says. “We knew that we could drop the hints that this [decision] is coming.” The extra details provided more devastating mythology to Evan’s sacrifice and a better argument for its theatrical inclusion—and it has only continued to feed Reddit board debates full of surprised first-time watchers . In what might otherwise have been a forgotten B-movie thriller with bungled logic , the extreme notes and controversial sequences have kept The Butterfly Effect in the collective memory as one of the most visceral cinematic attempts to tackle chaos theory.

Over time, Gruber has mellowed, seeing the merits of both endings. Bress does too, though after rewatching the movie recently, he’s struck by how much they punished moviegoers. “It does not take its foot off the gas pedal,” he says. “At one point, there’s no more humor. It just goes from bad to worse.” That realization has made him want to return to the past again. Even though the meet-cute contradicts the point of Evan’s entire sacrifice, Bress still thinks about taking a time machine to test the alternate romantic ending. “I’d be really curious to see how that would affect them,” he says of their audience. “I bet a lot of people would watch that and think even higher of the film.”

This provokes another debate between them.

“If we went with a traditional ending, would we have the almost-cult status of the movie?” Gruber asks. “Or would that have ruined it?”

Bress concedes his point. “I’d be like, ‘You fool, why did you go back in time?’”

Jake Kring-Schreifels is a sports and entertainment writer based in New York. His work has also appeared in Esquire.com, GQ.com, and The New York Times .

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When It Comes to Time-Travel Movies and TV Shows, What Rules Can We All Agree On?

The new time-travel film Looper involves mob hitmen contracted to blow away bad guys from the future who’ve been sent back in time to be terminated. It’s not a happy duty: When the assassins’$2 30-year terms of service are up, they know they’ll be sent back in time themselves to be capped, or “close the loop.” Unsurprisingly, Bruce Willis is having none of that — possibly because he already did all this in 12 Monkeys , a movie that held fast to the idea of immutable timelines, meaning you can’t really change the past — if you go back in time, you just put into place the past that has already happened. In Looper , past, present, and future are anything but stable. All of this is very complicated, but why obsess? As Willis tells his younger self (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) that if they were to start talking about timelines, “We’d be here all day drawing diagrams with straws.” Still, there are some rules that have evolved over the course of innumerable time-travel films and TV series, and for those planning a trip, here they are.

Don’t Mess With Yourself As with everything else concerning time travel, there are different rules and different schools of thought on this subject. Even when it might not cause the universe to end (as in Southland Tales ), it’s never a good idea to have different versions of yourself running around, as this might put an end to your own existence (as in Timecop ). According to the Pauli exclusion principle, no two identical particles can occupy the same space at the same time — everything will just go kablooey. Also, imagine the confusion — you can’t meet a past version of yourself and not have a memory of it, whereas a future version can’t be surprised to see you. (This is why in Looper , Bruce Willis complains about his foggy memory.) But what if you do have to engage your doppelgänger? Treat him or her as if you’re someone else, like Biff Tannen does in Back to the Future II — give out instructions, but not your identity. Or be like Spock in Star Trek and just remain detached.

This is all, of course, assuming you’re inhabiting two different bodies. Some time travel, however, only involves using one body — you find yourself to be older or younger, such as in The Butterfly Effect , Peggy Sue Got Married , Hot Tub Time Machine , and Click . Or you have no real physical body and can’t interact with the environment, if you’re traveling via someone’s memories in a Pensieve ( Harry Potter ) or a hologram ( Quantum Leap ). If this is the case, feel free to revise our advice.

Don’t Mess With Your Ancestors Marty McFly famously disrupts the moment when his parents were to meet and fall in love, which is why he has to reunite them — or else he won’t exist. Apart from the icky Freudian issues that arise in Back to the Future when his mom crushes on him instead of his dad (because, let’s face it, Michael J. Fox is cuter than Crispin Glover), screwing up your own conception is a very serious possibility in time travel. It even has a name: the grandfather paradox. Fry in Futurama experiences an even creepier wrinkle — after his grandfather dies, he ends up sleeping with his grandmother, in effect becoming his own grandfather.

On the flip side, if you know someone needs to go back in time to father you, as was the case with John Connor and Kyle Reese in The Terminator , make sure he falls in love with your mom. As Sarah Connor muses, “If you don’t send Kyle, you can never be. God, a person could go crazy thinking about this.” (Especially if you start thinking about how if you succeed in changing the future, you will also never be.) We say just don’t interfere with anything involving your conception, your birth ( The Butterfly Effect ), or any near-death experiences you’ve had ( Donnie Darko ), unless you want to disrupt your timeline big time.

Don’t Mess With Historical Figures (and Don’t Kill Hitler). Bill and Ted kidnap Socrates, Genghis Khan, Joan of Arc, Beethoven, Abraham Lincoln, Billy the Kid, and Sigmund Freud from their respective time periods for the sake of a history report ( Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure ), but what happened to those folks when they were returned to their own eras? It might be tempting to interact with and even dare to inspire such luminaries as Salvador Dali, Josephine Baker, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and Ernest Hemingway, et al. as Owen Wilson does in Midnight in Paris , but what if you wind up changing the course of history? What if your new friends start babbling about the future? That’s the kind of crazy talk that got Bruce Willis locked up in 12 Monkeys .

But the historical figure everyone seems to want to tangle with the most is Adolf Hitler. Imagine having a chance to kill him as a child and avert World War II! This is more or less Bruce Willis’s plan in Looper — he’s out to nail the child version of a shadowy future crimelord known as the Rainmaker. Unfortunately, this sort of thing never works. Just as when Sayid tried to kill Ben on Lost , this is what is known as the Hitler Exemption. Whatever you do, despite your best intentions, can cause a worse outcome. If it didn’t work for the Terminator, why would it work for you? Even Doctor Who argues against this plan, and Godwin’s Law of Time Travel backs him up. Also, there’s the annoying temporal paradox — if an evil is removed, then there will be no need for you to go back in time, and therefore the evil will not be averted.

You Can’t Save Them All. Unless you’re Superman and have world-spinning capabilities. Just as with the temptation to kill Hitler, you must resist the impulse to save a loved one in another time zone. It won’t work, according to a universe course-correction known as the self-consistency principle. If someone’s death in the past motivates you to create a time machine ( The Time Machine ), then that time machine can only exist because the person is dead. If you go back in time, they will still die ( The Time Traveler’s Wife ). Scientists who understand this principle in 12 Monkeys and Source Code don’t attempt to undo the past — they don’t try to stop the virus from spreading or the bomb from going off. Instead, they seek to identify causality, so they can create a vaccine in the future or track down the bomber before his next act of terrorism. But if you’ve got a hero complex, you might try snagging bodies who are about to die to serve as hosts ( Freejack ) or to repopulate the future ( Millennium ). Yeah, that might work.

Sweat The Small Things. The butterfly effect is a term partly derived from a Ray Bradbury story (later turned into a really bad film) called “A Sound of Thunder,” in which time-travel tourists accidentally step on a prehistoric butterfly, which changes the entire future. Little things matter, which means you’ll have to pay extreme attention to detail. That can be tiring, so we advise keeping your trip short — maybe thirteen seconds ( Galaxy Quest ), eight minutes ( Source Code ), or just a few hours ( Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban ). Plan ahead, and pack wisely (or arrange to have someone leave items for you), because you might need keys ( Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure ) or hard currency ( Looper ). As Safety Not Guaranteed suggested, you must bring your own weapons, and for that, we like the blunderbuss shotgun in Looper . That’s assuming you can bring any non-organic material at all — you might be naked ( Time Traveler’s Wife , Terminator ). Either way, your best advance strategy is great health insurance, because time travel is dangerous — you might get bleeds ( Primer ) and/or brain damage ( The Butterfly Effect ). Be prepared!

Use Your Time Wisely. Hermione Granger in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban used a Time-Turner to schedule extracurricular classes such as Divination and Muggle Studies. Phil Conners in Groundhog Day eventually used his extra days to learn how to play piano, speak French, and ice-sculpt. Erica in Being Erica uses time travel as a form of therapy to address the regrets in her life — but in the end learns it’s not about changing the past as much as it is about changing yourself. Risk of paradoxes: zero.

Prove It. Sometimes, you will have to convince someone that you really are from the future or the past, so having lots of information is good — a password ( Doctor Who ), the details of a baseball game that’s about to be played ( Frequency ), and other events that are about to happen ( Groundhog Day ). Depending where you are, saying that Ronald Reagan became president could be laughable to some ( Back to the Future ) — as would any contention that the Terminator became governor of California.

Beware The Crono-Cops. Be aware that time travel is usually illegal. Such is the case in Looper , which is why only the mob employs it. If it’s available in your time, there may be restrictions, so check with your local chronoguard, be they Time Cops or Time Lords, and make sure you’re within parameters. And happy travels!

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How The Butterfly Effect's Time Travel Works

Hello friends and fellow travelers, and welcome back for a new adventure here at the CinemaBlend labs! When we last met, we got to dig into the temporal madness of Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys , and yes, that was young Brad Pitt ’s butt! Also, if that film is to be believed, fate is a horrific mistress we cannot run from, no matter how many random voice mails you leave for future posterity. Quick sidetrack: does anyone else think 12 Monkeys would make a good double feature with Tenet ? Well, there’s no need to worry about that now, as this time out, we’ll be time traveling with Ashton Kutcher, as he tries to use The Butterfly Effect to create the perfect life.

If you really want to read a breakdown of Tenet , or any other time related adventure we’ve tackled during out studies in traveling from here to there in the then and now, you can always travel into our archives and read our studies nice and carefully. Though, it should be noted, that if you subscribe to the method of time travel that The Butterfly Effect displays throughout its twisted tale, you might not want to read too carefully. As an example of why you should be careful, I just opened up our past examination of the Happy Death Day time loops , and had to figure out how to escape all three loops that writeup entailed. Grab some compositional notebooks, a freshly sharpened pencil, and a ton of tissues with Aloe, as we’re about to dive into The Butterfly Effect’s chaotic theory on time travel.

The Butterfly Effect Evan, Kayleigh, and Lenny talk with Tommy before the prank

The Time Travel in The Butterfly Effect

Living in suburbia already has enough of a bum rap, but the lives of Evan Treborn ( Ashton Kutcher ) and Kayleigh Miller (Amy Smart) are filled with traumas all the way down. The pair of childhood sweethearts seem to be separated by fate, with Evan swearing to carve the perfect path for the two of them to live on. Which is where the young man’s time traveling abilities come into play.

Who's Time Traveling

Blessed (or cursed, depending on how you see things) with the hereditary ability to travel back in time, Evan is one of two time travelers that we know of in The Butterfly Effect . The only other person we see with those abilities is Jason (Callum Keith Rennie), Evan’s father.

From When To When

While there’s no exact time frame given to The Butterfly Effect’s chain of events, there’s an easy chain of clues to give us the three years that make up the film’s storyline. This time span is based off of the fact that in their teenage years, Evan and his friends go to see Se7en in its theatrical release, which happened in 1995. Using that as a benchmark, the childhood events six years prior would have taken place in 1989, with the bulk of the “present day” story being set seven years later, in 2002. So Evan’s traveling between events that take place in 1989, 1995, and 2002.

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The Purpose Of Their Trip

The one thing that Evan really wants in life is to be able to live in peace, with Kayleigh by his side. After accidentally triggering her suicide in the initial timeline of The Butterfly Effect , Evan gets the bright idea to revisit key points of traumatic events in their childhood, in order to fix their collective fate. But what starts out as a quest to save one life turns into a chain reaction that ruins several in its wake; leaving Evan to make another trip, in hopes that it will be the one to correct the entire mess.

The Butterfly Effect Evan writes in his journal

How Time Travel Happens In The Butterfly Effect

Good news, time travelers! The Butterfly Effect doesn’t require any sort of special computers of doom , hijacked alien vessels , or 1.21 Gigawatt lightning strikes that mimic the presence of plutonium! In a story that sees tons of problems crop up in the lives of Evan and his friends, all of the good news we can get is much appreciated. All you really need to time travel is a really good memory, thanks to a habit of keeping journals throughout your traumatic, blackout filled childhood.

Plagued by moments of lost time throughout his life, Evan is told to keep a journal of his memories, so he can more easily fill in the gaps he’s been experiencing. However, those journals, and his inherited abilities, are the ultimate method of time travel in The Butterfly Effect . All Evan has to do is concentrate on his journals extra hard, read back the memories he’s written down, and he’s transported back to the moments he wants to go to in order to potentially change everyone’s fate. This method also works with home movies, something that comes in handy when it comes to Evan’s final time traveling trip in the big finale.

Revisiting a memory can bring him back to that time and be in control of his past self.

The Butterfly Effect Kayleigh and Evan share a booth at the diner

Can History Be Changed As A Result Of Time Travel In The Butterfly Effect?

In the history of time travel examinations I’ve conducted here at the CinemaBlend labs, this is probably the most chaotic example of history being changed through the usage of time travel. Not to mention The Butterfly Effect takes its name from a bedrock set of principles in Chaos Theory that dictate the unpredictable nature one decision can have on changing the flow of time. At this point, I’d like to just say a quick thank you to two pioneers of Chaos Theory: Dr. Ian Malcolm and author Ray Bradbury !

As we see throughout Evan’s actions throughout his quest to create the perfect version of his life with Kayleigh, the more he tries to change things, the more out of control things get.

With Evan’s life alone, we see him go from a simple psych student to a frat boy, an amputee, a prisoner, and an unintentional murderer. Travelling back in time to key hinge points in his own timeline, The Butterfly Effect sees our protagonist, and everyone around him, changing with every alteration he decides to put into play. Each time, that decision rewrites the entirety of the timeline from that moment forward, with some pretty severe consequences on the line.

The Butterfly Effect Evan tries to look innocent in the exam room

What Are The Consequences Of Time Travel In The Butterfly Effect?

Evan’s trials and tribulations in The Butterfly Effect lead to all sorts of variations in his life, ranging from something as small as a cigarette burn to larger consequences like the deaths and/or traumas of his friends and family. There’s also a physical toll that Evan’s journey takes on him, as while he’s able to remember everything from the various timelines, by the time he gets to the final iteration, he’s packed on about 40 years worth of memories. With each new trip, each deviation from the previous timeline, Evan’s mind becomes more physically damaged and he come back with increasingly severe nosebleeds.

The Butterfly Effect does ultimately arrive at Evan arriving at a crossroads that see him arrive at one final play to save his life, and the lives of all around him. One path leads to a happier/bittersweet result, while the other is the darkest timeline possible. Depending on which cut you watch, the result differs drastically.

The Best Scenario In The Butterfly Effect

In the theatrical cut of The Butterfly Effect, Evan uses his mother’s home movies and goes back to the birthday party where he and Kayleigh met, circa 1989. Evan tells Kayleigh that he hates her, as well as delivers the ultimatum that if she ever comes near him again, “I’ll kill you and your whole damned family.” This scares Kayleigh into going to live with her mother, instead of her father, which wipes the entire history between Kayleigh, Tommy, Lenny, and Evan.

Kayleigh and Tommy live a happy life with their mother, while Evan and Lenny remain friends through life. Eventually, the boys even become college roommates; though the awesome memories of Ethan Suplee’s Thumper will live on forever. However, Evan does find Kayleigh again in 2002, as they pass as strangers in New York. Depending on which of the four endings to The Butterfly Effect you watch, the two friends either keep going their separate ways, or reconnect with a chance of paving the way to a new future together. Either way, someone who looks a lot like Demi Moore is probably on the other end of that phone call, as this flash forward is supposed to take place in 2010; provided our timeline math holds up.

The Worst Scenario In The Butterfly Effect

If you watched the Director’s Cut of The Butterfly Effect, there’s a totally different, much darker fate that awaits Evan. Rather than just separating himself from Kayleigh altogether, Evan thinks that the world would be a lot better off without him. This is supported by a deleted scene where a fortune teller literally tells him that he was “never meant to be,” and that he doesn’t even have a soul.

By time the ending to the Director’s Cut kicks in, the home movie Evan’s watching is the day that his mother gave birth to him. Just when you thought The Butterfly Effect couldn’t get any darker, our protagonist goes back to his own birth, and kills himself by strangulation in the womb. And based on the voice over from Evan’s mother Andrea (Melora Walters) that plays during his death, this might be the fourth time this sort of scenario has happened. With Evan out of the picture, the rest of the Theatrical Cut’s events occur, with Tommy and Kayleigh straightening up and Lenny never finding himself traumatized into a catatonic state.

The Butterfly Effect Evan walks away from Kayleigh

We'll Come Back For You

Friends and fellow travelers, thank you so much for taking this dark journey into the heart of The Butterfly Effect! If you like what you’ve seen, I’d like to remind you that you can hit the CinemaBlend Time Travel Archives and see past studies in temporal madness. Not to mention, if there’s a time travel story you really want to see broken down through our scientific methods, you can drop us a line and we’ll grab it in time. In fact, our next trip is one we’ve been looking forward to for a while, and it also came up as a suggestion from one of you fantastic fans!

Looks like it’s time to go back to space, the final frontier… again. You asked for it, you’ve been waiting for it, and I literally threw this into my list of initial stories to examine; yes folks, Star Trek ‘09 is next in the lineup! Which means I’ll need to fill out some pre-expedition paperwork with Tempus Fugit Insurance , so the inevitable damage claims get processed and paid in time.

Mike Reyes is the Senior Movie Contributor at CinemaBlend, though that title’s more of a guideline really. Passionate about entertainment since grade school, the movies have always held a special place in his life, which explains his current occupation. Mike graduated from Drew University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science, but swore off of running for public office a long time ago. Mike's expertise ranges from James Bond to everything Alita, making for a brilliantly eclectic resume. He fights for the user.

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Would stepping on the first butterfly really change the history of evolution?

by Jordi Paps, The Conversation

Martha Jones: It's like in those films: if you step on a butterfly, you change the future of the human race.

The Doctor: Then don't step on any butterflies. What have butterflies ever done to you?

Science fiction writers can't seem to agree on the rules of time travel. Sometimes, as in Doctor Who (above), characters can travel in time and affect small events without appearing to alter the grand course of history. In other stories, such as Back To The Future, even the tiniest of the time travellers' actions in the past produce major ripples that unpredictably change the future.

Evolutionary biologists have been holding a similar debate about how evolution works for decades. In 1989 (the year of Back To The Future Part II), the American palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould published his timeless book Wonderful Life, named after the classic movie that also involves time travel of sorts. In it, he proposed a thought experiment: what would happen if you could replay life's tape, rewinding the history of evolution and running it again? Would you still see the same movie with all the evolutionary events playing out as before? Or would it be more like a reboot, with species evolving in different ways?

Gould's answer was the latter. In his view, unpredictable events played a major role in natural history. If you were to travel back in time and step on the first butterfly (reminiscent of the 1952 short story A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury), then butterflies wouldn't evolve ever again.

This is supposedly because the variation we see in nature—the many different physical features and forms of behaviour that lifeforms can have – is caused by random genetic events, such as genetic mutations and recombination . Natural selection filters this variation, preserving and spreading the features that give organisms the best reproductive advantage. In Gould's view, because the series of mutations that led to the first butterfly were random, they would be unlikely to occur a second time.

Convergent evolution

But not everyone agrees with this picture. Some scientists defend the idea of " convergent evolution ". This is when organisms that aren't related to each other independently evolve similar features in response to their environment. For example, bats and whales are very different animals, but both have evolved the ability to "see" by listening to how sound echoes around them ( echolocation ). Both pandas and humans have evolved opposable thumbs . Powered flying has evolved at least four times , in birds, bats, pterosaurs, and insects like butterflies. And eyes have independently evolved at least 50 times in animal history.

Even intelligence has evolved multiple times. The famous palaeontologist Simon Conway-Morris was once asked if dinosaurs would have become intelligent if they were still here. His answer was that "the experiment has been done and we call them crows", referring to the fact that birds, including the very intelligent crow species, evolved from a group of dinosaurs.

Convergent evolution suggests that there are a few optimal ways in which species can adapt to their environment, which means that (if you have enough information) you could predict how a species is likely to evolve over a long time. If you were to step on the first butterfly, another butterfly-like insect will eventually evolve because other mutations will eventually produce the same features that will be favoured by natural selection.

A recent study in the journal Current Biology seems to tip the scale in favour of convergent evolution. This study investigates how stick spiders have evolved in the Hawaiian Islands and provides evidence for different, isolated groups of animals evolving the same features independently.

Islands are often referred to as natural laboratories because they are effectively closed environments. Every time a species colonises a new island, a new independent experiment on adaptation takes place. An iconic example is the finches that have adapted to the various food sources on each island of the Galapagos, a fact that helped Charles Darwin develop his theory of natural selection . Some of these populations have even been caught in the act of becoming new species of finch .

Most of the stick spiders on the Hawaiian Islands have gold, dark or white body colouring as camouflage to hide from predators, such as birds. The scientists used the DNA of the various spider species to reconstruct the history of how they evolved. They showed that the dark spiders and the white spiders have repeatedly evolved from ancestral gold spiders, six times in the case of the dark spiders and twice in the case of the white ones.

Chance or necessity?

This study is a remarkable example of convergent evolution taking place in the same geographical area. It's reminiscent of the classic studies on Anolis lizards by evolutionary ecologist Jonathan Losos, who noticed lizards on different Caribbean islands had independently evolved the same adaptations multiple times . All this suggests that lifeforms living in a specific environment over a long enough time period are likely to evolve certain features.

But the evidence for convergent evolution doesn't rule out the role of chance. There is no doubt that mutations and the biological variations they create are random. Organisms are a mosaic of multiple traits, each with different evolutionary histories. And that means whatever evolved in the butterfly's place might well not look exactly the same.

The evidence isn't conclusive either way, but maybe both chance and necessity play a role in evolution. If we were to run the tape of life again, I think we would end up with the same types of organisms we have today. There would probably be primary producers extracting nutrients from the soil and energy from the sun, and other organisms that move around and eat the primary producers. Many of these would have eyes, some would fly, and some would be intelligent. But they might look quite different from the plants and animals we know today. There might not even be any intelligent two-legged mammals.

So just in case you ever find yourself travelling back in time, don't step on any butterflies.

Provided by The Conversation

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5 Great Movies That Use The Butterfly Effect To Tell Their Stories

Even a tiny change in the past is enough to drastically alter the future. These mind-bending movies showcased the Butterfly Effect at its best.

The Butterfly Effect is part of the Chaos Theory that suggests that small, almost imperceptible changes in one part of a complex system can produce huge, unexpected results elsewhere. Jeff Goldblum’s character in Jurassic Park has iconically described it as a flap of a butterfly’s wings in the Amazonian jungle causing rain instead of sunshine in Central Park. It gets more complicated from there.

Numerous movies have explored the topic of the Butterfly Effect, where a single choice can alter the protagonist’s timeline. It seems that their characters are not familiar with the number one rule of any self-respecting time traveler — don’t change any detail in the past, no matter how small or seemingly trivial, or face the drastic consequences in the future. Instead, they keep ‘correcting’ their past choices in the hope of getting a better outcome. It’s like they’ve never seen Back to the Future .

RELATED: 5 Horror Movies That Involve Time Travel

One of the first movies to masterfully employ the Butterfly Effect-style plotline was the1981 (though released only in 1987 due to political censorship) Polish-language film Blind Chance , directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski. It explored three vastly different timelines created by a man catching or missing his train. The film covering tough topics like politics and religion set the bar high and prompted a wave of time-twisting, mind-bending features. These movies are excellent examples of the Butterfly Effect in action and a must-watch for any alternate reality-loving fan .

Frequency (2000)

Gregory Hoblit’s sci-fi thriller follows John Sullivan (Jim Caviezel), a homicide detective who finds a way to communicate with his firefighter father, Frank (Dennis Quaid), 30 years in the past over a HAM radio. John warns Frank about his impending death in a warehouse fire, therefore saving him but setting in motion a chain of events that leads to his mother’s murder. The father and son then join forces to find the killer and change the past/future once again.

The film is a rare case where time meddling results in an improved timeline rather than a metaphorical train wreck, common for the similarly-themed movies — a casually-dropped tip about an early investment in Yahoo! would do that. Frequency takes the Butterfly Effect and wraps it into a fast-paced and engaging thriller, well worthy of the attention of any sci-fi and action-loving fan.

Mr. Nobody (2009)

This sci-fi drama starring Jared Leto , Diane Kruger, Sarah Polley, and Rhys Ifans is a dazzling, thought-provoking, and philosophical piece that gained a cult status over the years. The splintering story follows Nemo Nobody (Leto), the last mortal on Earth left after the human race achieved quasi-immortality. Due to an anomaly occurring during his conception, Nemo can recall all the possible futures created by his life-altering choices — starting with a fundamental decision of whether to stay with his father or mother after their divorce — making the journalist interviewing him at the age of 118 struggle to determine the ‘real’ timeline.

Right from the start, the film introduces the concept of the Butterfly Effect, beautifully showcased by a floating leaf that causes Nemo’s parents to meet. It picks up from there, building into a wonderful cacophony of alternate realities and depicting a man at a constant crossroad. Mr. Nobody ’s non-linear, mind-bending narrative, gorgeous cinematography, deep characters, and exceptional soundtrack all rightfully make it one of the most iconic yet underappreciated movies diving into the countless ‘what if’ scenarios and outcomes.

Run Lola Run (1998)

Fast-paced, action-packed, and visually stunning, Run Lola Run became a cult classic, beloved by both its original German and international audience . Written and directed by Tom Tykwer, the movie follows Lola (Franka Potente), who has twenty minutes to reach her boyfriend, Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu), who messed up and now needs to get 100,000 Deutsche Mark or his boss will kill him. In three subsequent scenarios, Lola makes choices that alter the outcome and impact the fates of several side characters in the process.

Run Lola Run is an exhilarating ride, backed by a heart-pumping soundtrack, extraordinary cinematography, and electric chemistry between the main characters. Masterfully playing with the mix of the Butterfly Effect — true to its tagline “Every second of every day you make a choice that can change your life” — and Groundhog Day , the film is just as much a thought-provoking crime drama as it is a nail-biting action.

Donnie Darko (2001)

The director Richard Kelly will be forever remembered for creating the most puzzling, dark, and bizarre cinematic experience that is Donnie Darko — a movie that reached cult status by deliberately messing with people’s heads and leaving them deeply impacted but utterly confused. The story follows Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal), a moody teenager who is saved by a mysterious figure in a creepy bunny costume that calls him out of the room just moments before a jet engine crashes into it. After that, the rabbit, also known as Frank , tells Donnie the world will end in 28 days and convinces him to commit a series of crimes, which have unpredictable consequences for the people around him.

Donnie Darko feverishly throws together Butterfly Effect, Chaos Theory, time travel, paradoxes, quantum physics, and dream-like near-madness, creating an unparalleled experience. With the stellar, spot-on cast featuring Maggie Gyllenhaal, Drew Barrymore, Patrick Swayze, and Jena Malone and an unexpectedly twisted circular narrative, the movie remains one of the oddest and most intriguing features that leave the audience forever wondering what it all really meant.

The Butterfly Effect (2004)

It only makes sense to include this film among the others. Co-directed and co-written by Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, famous for the Final Destination series , this sci-fi drama follows a college student, Evan Treborn (Ashton Kutcher), who discovers he inherited the ability to time travel and decides to change the traumatic events that affected him and his friends in the past. Of course, nothing is simple, and his actions have dire and unfortunate consequences on the present.

Unlike Frequency or Back to the Future , The Butterfly Effect is a cautionary tale that suggests that the best thing a time traveler can do — unless they want to keep spreading pain and misery — is nothing. While the film’s original ending was much darker (featuring a pre-natal suicide), the movie famously ends on a bittersweet note, with Evan sacrificing his chance for true love to save the ones he cares about.

While The Butterfly Effect has been criticized for the inaccurate representation of the theory — Evan accurately calculating the odds for the best outcome technically goes against the chaos and unpredictability at the principle’s core — it remains an exciting, mind-twisting, and beautiful experience and a must-watch for any sci-fi fan with a soft spot for time-traveling romance.

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Time Travel Movies You Shouldn't Skip

Time travel is the spice of science fiction, capable of enhancing otherwise ordinary stories. Unfortunately, a whole lot of them end up over-seasoned. Many films involving time travel end up being hopelessly complicated, totally confusing, and altogether exhausting to experience. As a result, many sci-fi fans are wary of anything involving time travel at all. This isn't unreasonable: There are plenty of films like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3 that don't use time travel to its fullest potential, as well as movies like Assassin 33 A.D . which take the trope to ridiculous extremes. Striking a balance between cleverness and convolution is difficult — and, as a result, rare.

But that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of sci-fi movies utilizing time travel in clever, believable ways. Iconic films like Back to the Future , The Time Machine, and Terminator 2 live in the hearts of many for being entertaining, fun, and brilliant in their use of time travel. Put the bad experiences you've had with timeline-jumping plots aside for a moment, and give this selection of time travel-oriented movies a chance. No flow-charts, bulletin boards, or fandom wikis required.

The Butterfly Effect

The Butterfly Effect follows Evan Treborn, a young man who's been plagued by blackouts his entire life. When he revisits his adolescent journals, however, he discovers a special ability: He is able to travel back in time and redo moments of his childhood. This power is the source of his mysterious blackouts — during those moments, his adult consciousness was occupying his young body. Exploring this power helps Evan find answers, but not without making a mess of his life.

The film doesn't explain much about how Evan is able to travel through time, but The Butterfly Effect does emphasize the consequences of changing the natural order of things. This a dark film that marked Ashton Kutcher's first major departure from comedy: Certain scenes, namely one of heinous exploitation during Evan's childhood, are particularly intense. The script is clever, playing with alternate timelines and exploring concepts in chaos theory. Though The Butterfly Effect does not conclude happily, this is appropriate — the movie is entirely about time travel not being able to fix everything. But if you'd like another take on the story, alternate endings exist, which explore time travel as both blessing and curse.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

The Star Trek franchise is no stranger to time travel. Many of its episodes and movies use the device to tell stories that comment on history, oppression, and culture, while others are simply nostalgic. But one of the franchise's biggest trips to the past is an outright comedy. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home marks a departure from previous outings of the Enterprise — it's a funny film lacking a central villain. This was, as it turns out, a great choice: It is widely considered to be one of the best films in the series.

In this excursion, our heroes venture back in time to 1986. A mysterious alien probe threatens to destroy Earth if the answer to its indecipherable signal isn't provided. The crew of the Enterprise determine the signal to be the call of the humpback whale — an animal that, unfortunately, has been extinct for centuries. Thus, the crew journeys into the past, in search of a whale capable of answering the alien ship's call. The Voyage Home is a lighthearted adventure boosted by a stellar cast, that succeeds by treating time travel simply. The crew even gets to be a little cavalier with how they change history, which works because time travel isn't the point of the story. Rather, it's the means of telling it — and that makes all the difference.

Primer is a low budget indie film that takes a grounded approach to the genre, setting it apart from other time travel-centric movies. Engineers Aaron and Abe accidentally discover time travel, and decide to test the limits of the loop they create. Things quickly go awry — but not in the way you might expect.

Primer's creative concept piques the audience's interest while its character-driven nature keeps said interest engaged. Primer feels practical and possible, even when it's most full of scientific jargon. Sure, most people will require multiple viewings to fully understand the plot, but Primer makes the process worthwhile with a strong script and entertaining performances.

Several deep-dives offer extended explanations of the film, for those who'd like a bit of help. There's no shame in needing it — Primer has become infamous for its refusal to dumb anything down. Its triumph is in blending all that technicality with true artistry, resulting in a film as challenging as it is enjoyable. If you're in the mood for a time travel story made with scrupulous attention to detail, make Primer a priority.

Hot Tub Time Machine

Time machines come in many different forms, but the fact that the protagonists of this story use a hot tub to time travel should make it clear that Hot Tub Time Machine is a comedy. A trio of friends (and one errant nephew) dealing with mid-life problems gather together at a vacation spot of their youth. After a night of drinking, they wake to discover themselves transported back in time to 1986. Presented with this second chance, the group vacillates between striving to change nothing about their past and attempting to change everything.

Hot Tub Time Machine offers non-stop comedy, but also contains meaningful truths about middle-aged regret. Crucially, the three older protagonists must realize that the past wasn't actually as great as they remember. Sure, their trip through the 1980s is fun, wild, and nostalgic — but touchstones from the past are venerated as often as they're mocked in this film. Hot Tub Time Machine is a whole lot of fun, but it never sacrifices emotional honesty for laughs — and that's why it's worth watching.

Looper blends time travel with director Rian Johnson's trademark tension to tremendous effect. Joe, our protagonist, is a hitman known as a looper, who kills hooded people dropped from the future into the past. A looper's final kill is himself, which closes his own personal loop, keeping things neat — according to the crime syndicate Joe works for, anyway. When Joe encounters his older self, however, things quickly get messy. Looper combines romance, action, and telekinesis — that's right, this movie features telekinesis and time travel – and ends up with a wild and engaging story.

Through skillful storytelling and extended montages, Looper explores both Joes' stories with sympathy and insight. As the second half of the film adds further dimension and conflict to their story, Looper does indeed become a bit confusing, but never in a way that overwhelms. Looper is an ambitious, inventive film worth investing time in, boasting two killer lead performances from Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt .

One of the few time travel movies that can be called a legit tear-jerker, About Time is a quintessentially English romantic comedy. Upon turning 21, Cornwall resident Tim Lake is told that all the men in his family can travel through time if they think about it hard enough. Thus empowered, Tim sets out to use his gift to perfect his love life.

Naturally, things become complicated. Tim fumbles through the awkwardness of living and loving until he gets things right — for the most part, anyway. Directed by Richard Curtis, the man behind Four Weddings and a Funeral , Notting Hill , Love Actually , and the Bridget Jones movies, About Time is another warm-hearted hit, uniquely enhanced by its sci-fi twist. The cast is solid, with Bill Nighy in particular stealing every scene he's in. About Time's sense of humor combines marvelously with its genuine emotion — the time travel plot is the cherry on the sundae.

Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys tells a story about living in the present, despite knowledge of dire possibilities that may be set in stone. James Cole, played by Bruce Willis, is a prisoner from a bleak future who is sent back in time to discover the origins of a world-threatening virus. Things don't go according to plan, with Cole ending up in a mental hospital in the wrong year. Add in an interesting cast of characters ranging from Brad Pitt's Jeffrey Goines, a radical environmentalist, to Madeleine Stowe's skeptical Dr. Kathryn Railly, and 12 Monkeys becomes a rip-roaring journey through time.

12 Monkeys features a uniquely dirty aesthetic that has aged tremendously well. Moreover, the film's cast handles the tense, twisty story with confident skill, guiding the audience through complex storylines by the light of their impassioned performances. 12 Monkeys is simultaneously grounded and ambitious, as fearlessly strange as it is truly emotional. No wonder it's considered a sci-fi classic .

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time

The Girl who Leapt Through Time follows Mokoto Konno, a young girl whose life is almost cut short by a train. At the moment of impact, however, she is thrown back in time. Like most teenagers would, she decides to use her newfound abilities frivolously, avoiding awkward conversations about dating, reliving a karaoke session for hours, and getting flawless grades. These fixes don't come without consequence, however, as Mokoto soon realizes.

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time doesn't force its moral upon the audience. Rather, its points are left to sink in, and never overstay their welcome. This is most apparent in the movie's central romance, which is subtle and bittersweet — and all the more powerful for it. Visually, this award-winning anime bursts with lush background art and fluid, expressive character movement. Altogether, this is a charming, melancholy movie about friendship, adolescence, and moving forward. And hey, if you love it, there's a manga that takes the story even further.

X-Men: Days of Future Past

The X-Men are no strangers to time travel. Days of Future Past sends them on that journey once more, led by a crop of new actors playing younger versions of the mutants we know and love. Wolverine, played by the inimitable Hugh Jackman , is let loose in 1973, tasked with pulling together a team that desperately doesn't want to work together. Even after the key players are assembled, Professor Xavier and Magneto are still not on the same page, each fighting to guide Mystique down a different path. But hey, it's the X-Men. What are they going to do — get along?

Days of Future Past explores generational clash to great effect. Comic fans will find plenty to enjoy as well: The iconic Sentinels are here, as well as beloved characters like Blink, the villainous Bolivar Trask, and Quicksilver , who nearly steals the movie with one spectacular scene. All in all, Days of Future Past is viewed by many as one of the best films in the X-Men series for very good reason.

Safety Not Guaranteed

Safety Not Guaranteed subverts expectations of a time travel movie, presenting a heartfelt story that flirts with its own strange premise before diving in. Three journalists set off to investigate an ad in the paper ( based on an actual ad in a magazine that reached momentary internet fame) from a man seeking someone to go back in time with him. It sounds like a joke, but as each character discovers, it isn't. What follows is a deeply emotional journey that highlights the importance of living in the moment, savoring time with loved ones, and seizing off-the-wall opportunities.

The movie's biggest draw is Aubrey Plaza , who minimizes her trademark snark and delivers one of her best performances as a result. Though the majority of the movie keeps things light-hearted, the ending has divided many viewers. Some believe that it seems unearned , but others feel like the conclusion offers a true payoff that blends the movie's meaning with sci-fi appeal. What side will you fall on? You'll have to watch to find out.

What is the Butterfly Effect in Time Travel?

In 1972, during the 139th meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Edward Lorenz posed the question :- Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas ?

It wasn't the first time that this question had been posed but it was when people sat up and began to take notice. In 1800, Gernan philospher Johann Gottlieb Fichte wrote in "The Vocation of Man", "you could not remove a single grain of sand from its place without thereby ... changing something throughout all parts of the immeasurable whole"

It is part of a larger Chaos Theory in that apparently random states of disorder and irregularities are often governed by deterministic laws that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. Wiki

The whole point is to say whether something so innocuous can have wide and reaching consequences of a much larger event. The innocuous event in the first was the flap and the minor wind that is caused by the flapping of the wings could have a knock on effect. The result of the event might not have an effect at all, we just don't know.

If you change something in the past, it could have knock off effect for you in the future . A minor change you caused in the past could result in the Grandfather Paradox meaning you couldn't be born and therefore you wouldn't have been able to travel back into the past to cause you to not be born.

If you took a dinosaur out of time, you'd probably think it might not cause a reaction over 65 million years later. That dinosaurs fossil could be the fossil that an archaeologist discovered and had he not discovered it would have an effect on his life and that change could ripple through to you.

If you do travel back into history, you might have done so to possibly change the course of history so any change you do will have an effect on the future. The change you make will have a domino affect of effecting things you had not planned for.

Butterfly Effect doesn't just apply to time travel , it can refer to the here and now. Do you go right or left, would there be an effect on your future. There's no way of actually knowing. Its about tiny things affecting much larger things.

If you could go back in time, what would you change. Would you have prevented both World Wars by preventing the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Ferdinand was killed by Gavrilo Princip who happened to be in the right place due to a very simple error. The driver of Ferdinands car thought he was to turn due to a misunderstanding. If the driver had gone the right way, Princip would not have been in position to assassinate Ferdinand. As a result of the assassination, Germany invaded Serbia and the war started. History

Imagine a time-traveller going back into the past and prevented the driver from going the wrong way. Ferdinand would not have been killed and Germany would not have invaded Serbia sparking the First and then Second World War.

Its not possible to say that World War I would never have been as there could have been a second attempt on Ferdinand's life and that one would have been successful. Princip's colleagues could have carried out another attempt. A time traveller may only have postponed the inevitable.

In the Doctor Who series, The Doctor tells of events that are fixed and therefore can't be changed, the World War could be an example of one of those events. You'd only probably be able to postpone the war, you couldn't probably ever prevent it as another incident could kick it off.

Butterfly Effect Movie

In 2004, a film starring Ashton Kutcher was released. In the film, the main lead, Evan was able to travel back in time and alter his time line ever so slightly. Every time he went back, the result had a major effect on his life In one turn of events, he would end up in prison for murder. Only when he told his close female friend at the time, Kayleigh to get lost does everything pan out properly.

Winning the Lottery

Lets say you've got the numbers for the mega roll-over and decided to travel back into the past to either buy a ticket with those numbers or buy the ticket which the winner bought presuming he won via lucky dip, assuming that was how that person got the numbers. By buying the ticket the winner won, you could effectively make him not a winner and therefore you win all the money.

Let say you brought a ticket with the winning numbers to share. You expect to win but when the numbers are drawn, they are not the numbers you were expecting. By buying the numbers has caused a ripple causing a new set of numbers to be generated.

If you attempted to buy the winners ticket before he did it, you'd probably need pin point accuracy of the time when the winners numbers were drawn presuming that the winner did it via lucky dip. You might prevent the real winner from getting those numbers but there's no guarantee you'd get them and if you didn't the numbers might therefore be generated for someone else and you end up sharing even if you planned not to.

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Screen Rant

How the butterfly effect violates its own time travel rules.

2004 sci-fi/horror movie The Butterfly Effect has its lead character repeatedly travel through time, but at one point breaks its own rules.

2004 sci-fi/horror movie The Butterfly Effect has its lead character repeatedly travel through time, but at one point breaks its own rules. Time travel stories are inherently difficult to keep straight, if only because time travel isn't a thing we can actually do, at least that anyone knows of. Thus, writers are forced to rely either on existing scientific theories, or make up their own rules for time travel out of whole cloth, sometimes combining both methods.

It's become a bit of a running joke over the years among movie fans just how jumbled and hard to follow some time travel tales can become, especially if told over the course of a franchise. When things get too confusing, some viewers just choose to throw up their hands and accept what they're being given at face value, but others find it hard to suspend their disbelief when events happen in a time travel story that just don't make any sense, even by the rules established in that very film.

Related: The Butterfly Effect’s Director's Cut Changes Explained

The Butterfly Effect is no different in that respect. Although a commercial hit at the time of its release, and a popular enough film to warrant a series of direct to video sequels, writers/directors Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber didn't quite succeed in making The Butterfly Effect a logically consistent movie.

In The Butterfly Effect, lead character Evan Treborn ( Ashton Kutcher ) discovers that by reading his childhood journals, he can transport himself back through time into those same memories. Evan discovers he can use this to change the past, and tries to make the present better for himself and those he cares about. The problem is, as per the title, every change he makes comes with unintended consequences. Throughout the film, it's shown that when Evan returns to the present after changing the past, he's now created a new timeline of events that resulted from those changes. Thus, he's the only one aware anything is different.

During one such altered timeline, Evan accidentally murders his girlfriend's unstable brother Tommy in a fit of rage, and goes to prison for the crime. To gain access to his journals and try to once again fix the present, Evan must convince a religious fellow prisoner to help him out. He does this by using a childhood drawing to return to the past, and violently stab his hands onto pointed document holders in the classroom. Scars then are shown to magically appear on Evan's hands in the present. The thing is, that makes absolutely no sense.

By the rules of The Butterfly Effect, Evan's actions should've created another alternate timeline, and when he gets back to the present, the scars should've already been there the whole time, with only Evan being aware he didn't used to have them. Additionally, doing such a grotesque action as a child likely would've drastically altered Evan's life in the near term, and the ripple effects from that could've easily led to a reality in which Evan never got to the point where he killed Tommy, and thus never went to prison. It's an inexplicably dumb moment in an otherwise pretty good film.

More: 10 Things You've Never Noticed From The Butterfly Effect

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Time Travel, Parallel Universe, Butterfly Effect

Movies or TV
IMDb Rating
In Theaters
Release Year

1. Mr. Nobody (2009)

R | 141 min | Drama, Fantasy, Romance

A boy stands on a station platform as a train is about to leave. Should he go with his mother or stay with his father? Infinite possibilities arise from this decision. As long as he doesn't choose, anything is possible.

Director: Jaco Van Dormael | Stars: Jared Leto , Sarah Polley , Diane Kruger , Linh-Dan Pham

Votes: 245,791 | Gross: $0.00M

2. The Butterfly Effect (2004)

R | 113 min | Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Evan Treborn suffers blackouts during significant events of his life. As he grows up, he finds a way to remember these lost memories and a supernatural way to alter his life by reading his journal.

Directors: Eric Bress , J. Mackye Gruber | Stars: Ashton Kutcher , Amy Smart , Melora Walters , Elden Henson

Votes: 521,019 | Gross: $57.94M

3. Predestination (I) (2014)

R | 97 min | Action, Drama, Sci-Fi

As his last assignment, a temporal agent is tasked to travel back in time and prevent a bomb attack in New York in 1975. The hunt, however, turns out to be beyond the bounds of possibility.

Directors: Michael Spierig , Peter Spierig | Stars: Ethan Hawke , Sarah Snook , Noah Taylor , Madeleine West

Votes: 304,623 | Gross: $0.07M

4. The Incident (2014)

100 min | Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Two parallel stories about characters trapped in illogical endless spaces: two brothers and a detective locked on an infinite staircase, and a family locked on an infinite road - for a very long time.

Director: Isaac Ezban | Stars: Raúl Méndez , Magda Brugengheim , Humberto Busto , Erick Trinidad Camacho

Votes: 4,313

5. Donnie Darko (2001)

R | 113 min | Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi

After narrowly escaping a bizarre accident, a troubled teenager is plagued by visions of a man in a large rabbit suit who manipulates him to commit a series of crimes.

Director: Richard Kelly | Stars: Jake Gyllenhaal , Jena Malone , Mary McDonnell , Holmes Osborne

Votes: 849,855 | Gross: $1.48M

6. Another Earth (2011)

PG-13 | 92 min | Drama, Mystery, Romance

On the night of the discovery of a duplicate Earth in the Solar system, an ambitious young student and an accomplished composer cross paths in a tragic accident.

Director: Mike Cahill | Stars: Brit Marling , William Mapother , Matthew-Lee Erlbach , DJ Flava

Votes: 100,000 | Gross: $1.32M

7. Timecrimes (2007)

R | 92 min | Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi

A man accidentally gets into a time machine and travels back in time nearly an hour. Finding himself will be the first of a series of disasters of unforeseeable consequences.

Director: Nacho Vigalondo | Stars: Karra Elejalde , Candela Fernández , Bárbara Goenaga , Nacho Vigalondo

Votes: 68,758 | Gross: $0.04M

8. Source Code (2011)

PG-13 | 93 min | Action, Drama, Mystery

A soldier wakes up in someone else's body and discovers he's part of an experimental government program to find the bomber of a commuter train within 8 minutes.

Director: Duncan Jones | Stars: Jake Gyllenhaal , Michelle Monaghan , Vera Farmiga , Jeffrey Wright

Votes: 549,639 | Gross: $54.71M

9. Cloud Atlas (2012)

R | 172 min | Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi

An exploration of how the actions of individual lives impact one another in the past, present and future, as one soul is shaped from a killer into a hero, and an act of kindness ripples across centuries to inspire a revolution.

Directors: Tom Tykwer , Lana Wachowski , Lilly Wachowski | Stars: Tom Hanks , Halle Berry , Hugh Grant , Hugo Weaving

Votes: 374,350 | Gross: $27.11M

10. Triangle (2009)

R | 99 min | Fantasy, Mystery, Sci-Fi

Five friends set sail and their yacht is overturned by a strange and sudden storm. A mysterious ship arrives to rescue them, and what happens next cannot be explained.

Director: Christopher Smith | Stars: Melissa George , Joshua McIvor , Jack Taylor , Michael Dorman

Votes: 129,738

11. Coherence (2013)

Not Rated | 89 min | Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi

Strange things begin to happen when a group of friends gather for a dinner party on an evening when a comet is passing overhead.

Director: James Ward Byrkit | Stars: Emily Baldoni , Maury Sterling , Nicholas Brendon , Elizabeth Gracen

Votes: 145,852 | Gross: $0.07M

12. The One I Love (2014)

R | 91 min | Comedy, Drama, Fantasy

A troubled couple vacate to a beautiful getaway, but bizarre circumstances further complicate their situation.

Director: Charlie McDowell | Stars: Mark Duplass , Elisabeth Moss , Ted Danson , Kiana Cason

Votes: 43,510 | Gross: $0.51M

13. Primer (2004)

PG-13 | 77 min | Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Four friends/fledgling entrepreneurs, knowing that there's something bigger and more innovative than the different error-checking devices they've built, wrestle over their new invention.

Director: Shane Carruth | Stars: Shane Carruth , David Sullivan , Casey Gooden , Anand Upadhyaya

Votes: 114,128 | Gross: $0.42M

14. +1 (2013)

Not Rated | 96 min | Romance, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Three college friends hit the biggest party of the year, where a mysterious phenomenon disrupts the night, quickly descending into a chaos that challenges their friendships - and whether they can stay alive.

Director: Dennis Iliadis | Stars: Rhys Wakefield , Logan Miller , Ashley Hinshaw , Natalie Hall

Votes: 8,486

15. Mulholland Drive (2001)

R | 147 min | Drama, Mystery, Thriller

After a car wreck on Mulholland Drive renders a woman amnesiac, she and a Hollywood-hopeful search for clues and answers across Los Angeles in a twisting venture beyond dreams and reality.

Director: David Lynch | Stars: Naomi Watts , Laura Harring , Justin Theroux , Jeanne Bates

Votes: 383,712 | Gross: $7.22M

16. Looper (2012)

R | 119 min | Action, Drama, Sci-Fi

In 2074, when the mob wants to get rid of someone, the target is sent into the past, where a hired gun awaits - someone like Joe - who one day learns the mob wants to 'close the loop' by sending back Joe's future self for assassination.

Director: Rian Johnson | Stars: Joseph Gordon-Levitt , Bruce Willis , Emily Blunt , Paul Dano

Votes: 602,861 | Gross: $66.49M

17. The Matrix (1999)

R | 136 min | Action, Sci-Fi

When a beautiful stranger leads computer hacker Neo to a forbidding underworld, he discovers the shocking truth--the life he knows is the elaborate deception of an evil cyber-intelligence.

Directors: Lana Wachowski , Lilly Wachowski | Stars: Keanu Reeves , Laurence Fishburne , Carrie-Anne Moss , Hugo Weaving

Votes: 2,052,403 | Gross: $171.48M

18. The Thirteenth Floor (1999)

R | 100 min | Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

A computer scientist running a virtual reality simulation of 1937 becomes the primary suspect when his colleague and mentor is murdered.

Director: Josef Rusnak | Stars: Craig Bierko , Gretchen Mol , Armin Mueller-Stahl , Vincent D'Onofrio

Votes: 77,255 | Gross: $15.50M

19. Blind Chance (1987)

Not Rated | 114 min | Drama, Romance

Witek runs after a train. Three variations follow on how such a seemingly banal incident could influence the rest of Witek's life.

Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski | Stars: Boguslaw Linda , Tadeusz Lomnicki , Zbigniew Zapasiewicz , Boguslawa Pawelec

Votes: 11,197

20. Run Lola Run (1998)

R | 80 min | Action, Crime, Thriller

After a botched money delivery, Lola has 20 minutes to come up with 100,000 Deutschmarks.

Director: Tom Tykwer | Stars: Franka Potente , Moritz Bleibtreu , Herbert Knaup , Nina Petri

Votes: 206,953 | Gross: $7.27M

21. Click (2006)

PG-13 | 107 min | Comedy, Drama, Fantasy

A workaholic architect finds a universal remote that allows him to fast-forward and rewind to different parts of his life. Complications arise when the remote starts to overrule his choices.

Director: Frank Coraci | Stars: Adam Sandler , Kate Beckinsale , Christopher Walken , David Hasselhoff

Votes: 356,622 | Gross: $137.36M

22. Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

PG-13 | 113 min | Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

A soldier fighting aliens gets to relive the same day over and over again, the day restarting every time he dies.

Director: Doug Liman | Stars: Tom Cruise , Emily Blunt , Bill Paxton , Brendan Gleeson

Votes: 736,578 | Gross: $100.21M

23. Groundhog Day (1993)

PG | 101 min | Comedy, Drama, Fantasy

A narcissistic, self-centered weatherman finds himself in a time loop on Groundhog Day.

Director: Harold Ramis | Stars: Bill Murray , Andie MacDowell , Chris Elliott , Stephen Tobolowsky

Votes: 684,895 | Gross: $70.91M

24. I Love You, I Love You (1968)

91 min | Drama, Sci-Fi

After attempting suicide, Claude is recruited for a time travel experiment, but, when the machine goes haywire, he may be trapped hurtling through his memories.

Director: Alain Resnais | Stars: Claude Rich , Olga Georges-Picot , Anouk Ferjac , Alain MacMoy

Votes: 3,271 | Gross: $0.06M

25. Time Lapse (2014)

Not Rated | 104 min | Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Three friends discover a mysterious machine that takes pictures twenty-four hours into the future, and conspire to use it for personal gain, until disturbing and dangerous images begin to develop.

Director: Bradley King | Stars: Danielle Panabaker , Matt O'Leary , George Finn , John Rhys-Davies

Votes: 49,127

26. Comet (2014)

R | 91 min | Comedy, Drama, Romance

Set in a parallel universe, Comet bounces back and forth over the course of an unlikely but perfectly paired couple's six-year relationship.

Director: Sam Esmail | Stars: Justin Long , Emmy Rossum , Kayla Servi , Eric Winter

Votes: 19,650

27. The Time Traveler's Wife (2009)

Henry DeTamble, a librarian, possesses a unique gene that lets him involuntarily travel through time. His wife, Claire Abshire, finds it difficult to cope with it.

Director: Robert Schwentke | Stars: Eric Bana , Rachel McAdams , Ron Livingston , Michelle Nolden

Votes: 157,882 | Gross: $63.41M

28. Sliding Doors (1998)

PG-13 | 99 min | Comedy, Drama, Fantasy

After personal and professional setbacks, a woman experiences an alternate reality.

Director: Peter Howitt | Stars: Gwyneth Paltrow , John Hannah , John Lynch , Jeanne Tripplehorn

Votes: 71,484 | Gross: $11.88M

29. La Jetée (1962)

Not Rated | 28 min | Short, Drama, Romance

The story of a man forced to explore his memories in the wake of World War III's devastation, told through still images.

Director: Chris Marker | Stars: Étienne Becker , Jean Négroni , Hélène Chatelain , Davos Hanich

Votes: 37,052

30. 12 Monkeys (1995)

R | 129 min | Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

In a future world devastated by disease, a convict is sent back in time to gather information about the man-made virus that wiped out most of the human population on the planet.

Director: Terry Gilliam | Stars: Bruce Willis , Madeleine Stowe , Brad Pitt , Joseph Melito

Votes: 646,549 | Gross: $57.14M

31. The Golden Compass (2007)

PG-13 | 113 min | Adventure, Family, Fantasy

In a parallel universe, young Lyra Belacqua journeys to the far North to save her best friend and other kidnapped children from terrible experiments by a mysterious organization.

Director: Chris Weitz | Stars: Nicole Kidman , Daniel Craig , Dakota Blue Richards , Ben Walker

Votes: 196,814 | Gross: $70.11M

32. Midnight in Paris (2011)

PG-13 | 94 min | Comedy, Fantasy, Romance

While on a trip to Paris with his fiancée's family, a nostalgic screenwriter finds himself mysteriously going back to the 1920s every day at midnight.

Director: Woody Allen | Stars: Owen Wilson , Rachel McAdams , Kathy Bates , Kurt Fuller

Votes: 449,793 | Gross: $56.82M

33. Frequency (2000)

PG-13 | 118 min | Crime, Drama, Mystery

An accidental cross-time radio link connects father and son across 30 years. The son tries to save his father's life, but then must fix the consequences.

Director: Gregory Hoblit | Stars: Dennis Quaid , Jim Caviezel , Shawn Doyle , Elizabeth Mitchell

Votes: 115,723 | Gross: $45.01M

34. Premonition (I) (2007)

PG-13 | 96 min | Drama, Fantasy, Mystery

A depressed woman learns that her husband was killed in a car accident the previous day, then awakens the next morning to find him alive and well at home; then awakens the day after that to find that he's dead.

Director: Mennan Yapo | Stars: Sandra Bullock , Julian McMahon , Amber Valletta , Shyann McClure

Votes: 81,707 | Gross: $47.85M

35. Black Mirror (2011– ) Episode: The Entire History of You (2011)

TV-MA | 49 min | Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi

In the near future, everyone has access to a memory implant that records everything they do, see and hear. You need never forget a face again - but is that always a good thing?

Director: Brian Welsh | Stars: Toby Kebbell , Jodie Whittaker , Tom Cullen , Amy Beth Hayes

Votes: 64,743

36. Black Mirror (2011– ) Episode: San Junipero (2016)

TV-MA | 61 min | Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi

When Yorkie and Kelly visit San Junipero, a fun-loving beach town full of surf, sun and sex, their lives are changed.

Director: Owen Harris | Stars: Gugu Mbatha-Raw , Mackenzie Davis , Denise Burse , Raymond McAnally

Votes: 66,912

37. Black Mirror (2011– ) Episode: White Christmas (2014)

TV-MA | 73 min | Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi

Three interconnected tales of technology run amok during the Christmas season are told by two men at a remote outpost in a frozen wilderness.

Director: Carl Tibbetts | Stars: Jon Hamm , Rafe Spall , Oona Chaplin , Natalia Tena

Votes: 68,205

38. Black Mirror (2011– ) Episode: Nosedive (2016)

TV-MA | 63 min | Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi

A woman desperate to boost her social media score hits the jackpot when she's invited to a swanky wedding, but the trip doesn't go as planned.

Director: Joe Wright | Stars: Bryce Dallas Howard , Alice Eve , Cherry Jones , James Norton

Votes: 64,150

39. Black Mirror (2011– ) Episode: Playtest (2016)

TV-MA | 57 min | Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi

An American traveler short on cash signs up to test a revolutionary new gaming system, but soon can't tell where the hot game ends and reality begins.

Director: Dan Trachtenberg | Stars: Wyatt Russell , Hannah John-Kamen , Wunmi Mosaku , Ken Yamamura

Votes: 53,552

40. Black Mirror (2011– ) Episode: Fifteen Million Merits (2011)

TV-MA | 62 min | Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi

In a world where people's lives consist of riding exercise bikes to gain credits, Bing tries to help a woman get on to a singing competition show.

Director: Euros Lyn | Stars: Daniel Kaluuya , Jessica Brown Findlay , Rupert Everett , Julia Davis

Votes: 62,773

41. The Twilight Zone (1959–1964)

TV-PG | 51 min | Drama, Fantasy, Horror

Ordinary people find themselves in extraordinarily astounding situations, which they each try to solve in a remarkable manner.

Stars: Rod Serling , Robert McCord , Jay Overholts , James Turley

Votes: 93,103

42. Fringe (2008–2013)

TV-14 | 46 min | Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi

An F.B.I. agent is forced to work with an institutionalized scientist and his son in order to rationalize a brewing storm of unexplained phenomena.

Stars: Anna Torv , Joshua Jackson , John Noble , Jasika Nicole

Votes: 257,431

43. The Lost Room (2006)

TV-PG | 90 min | Action, Fantasy, Mystery

A detective investigates a mysterious motel room which acts as a portal to anywhere in the world.

Stars: Peter Krause , Julianna Margulies , Peter Jacobson , Dennis Christopher

Votes: 33,069

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Butterfly Tale review – kids insect story wants to take long trip south to Mexico

Anodyne children’s picture provides some gentle entertainment once you forgive the cloying anthropomorphism

‘I s that a butterfly fairy?” asks a confused seven-year-old who watches with me, pointing to the screen at the start of this Canadian animated tale. Nope. The purple creature with a humanish face and body, dressed in a hoodie, wings poking out of its back, is in fact the film’s rendering of a monarch butterfly. The film-makers behind this have really outdone themselves with their tackily revolting anthropomorphic butterflies. Still, if you can get past mutilating a wonder of nature, the movie is a harmless and rather sweet cartoon for under-eights.

Teenager Patrick is a monarch who cannot fly because of an undeveloped wing. His dad was a big hero in the community after pecking out the eye of a fearsome eagle (he paid the price too). But because of his wing, Patrick has been banned from taking part in the annual winter migration south to Mexico. Not this year, says his overprotective mum. (The film ignores the fact that the monarchs make their incredible epic journey only once.) So, Patrick turns stowaway, hiding in the emergency food supply with his chubby caterpillar pal.

The pair get discovered pretty quickly, and what follows is some light jeopardy – first from a tornado then at the claws of that one-eyed eagle. This is mild stuff with a few upbeat highly unoriginal messages added about the importance of being yourself and overcoming your fears. It’s an easy watch, but disappears almost without trace. The biggest pleasure – in my house anyway – was the discovery that “flutter” is a collective noun for butterflies.

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A Sound of Thunder (2005)
A Sound of Thunder: Directed by Peter Hyams. With Armin Rohde, Heike Makatsch, Jemima Rooper, David Oyelowo. A single mistake in the past, by a time travel company in the future, has devastating and unforeseen consequences.
movie
Time travel stories rely on several "laws" or paradoxes, sometimes in conflict with one another: the butterfly effect (as seen in Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder, the one about the dinosaur hunter stepping on a, literal, butterfly and coming back to a totalitarian future).This requires time travelers to be exceedingly careful and usually require lots of observation and fine-tuning (e.g. Asimov's ...
A Sound of Thunder (film)
A Sound of Thunder is a 2005 American science fiction thriller film directed by Peter Hyams and starring Edward Burns, Catherine McCormack and Ben Kingsley.It is a co-production film between the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, and the Czech Republic. The film is based on the 1952 short story of the same name by Ray Bradbury.It is about "time tourists" who accidentally interfere too ...
A Sound of Thunder
Influence. "A Sound of Thunder" is often credited as the origin of the term "butterfly effect", a concept of chaos theory in which the flapping of a butterfly's wings in one part of the world could create a hurricane on the opposite side of the globe. The term was actually introduced by meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz in the 1960s.
A Sound of Thunder (2005)
It's 2055, and time travel is now possible. When a group of safari hunters travel back to prehistoric time to kill a tyrannosaurus Rex, an equipment failure causes one time traveler to panic and step on a butterfly, thus disrupting the entire evolution of life on earth. Cool story, right? Poorly, poorly, poorly executed.
A Sound of Thunder
But, during one time-travel safari, a hunter steps on a butterfly and unleashes a drastic ripple effect through time. Now researcher Dr. Travis Ryer (Edward Burns) must travel back to prevent the ...
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A man accidentally gets into a time machine and travels back in time nearly an hour. Finding himself will be the first of a series of disasters of unforeseeable consequences. Director: Nacho Vigalondo | Stars: Karra Elejalde, Candela Fernández, Bárbara Goenaga, Nacho Vigalondo. Votes: 68,712 | Gross: $0.04M.
Butterfly Effect Time Travel Rule-Breaking Scene Is STILL Bothering Fans
Published Dec 23, 2022. Many years after its release, one scene in The Butterfly Effect which breaks the movie's own time travel rules is still bothering fans to this day. One scene in The Butterfly Effect is still bothering fans to this day. Released in 2004, the sci-fi thriller stars Ashton Kutcher as Evan Treborn who, as a child, has a ...
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Time travel and all of its quirks and reality-altering consequences have become a part of the cultural language, with even the casual moviegoer knowing what happens if you step on a butterfly in ...
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The Meanest Time Travel Movie Ever Made, 20 Years Later. If 'The Butterfly Effect' is remembered for anything, it's unrelenting cruelty. The thing is, it was almost even crueler. By Jake ...
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The Terminator - 100%. 1984's James Cameron masterpiece tops the list with a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes. While many fans believe that Terminator 2: Judgement Day is the superior film, The Terminator is the original and the one that deals most directly with time travel. Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as the Terminator himself, who is sent back ...
When It Comes to Time-Travel Movies and TV Shows, What Rules ...
The butterfly effect is a term partly derived from a Ray Bradbury story (later turned into a really bad film) called "A Sound of Thunder," in which time-travel tourists accidentally step on a ...
How The Butterfly Effect's Time Travel Works
In the theatrical cut of The Butterfly Effect, Evan uses his mother's home movies and goes back to the birthday party where he and Kayleigh met, circa 1989. Evan tells Kayleigh that he hates her ...
The 10 Best Time Travel Movies According to Rotten Tomatoes
Related: Rick & Morty: Every Time Travel Movie Reference In Season 4, Episode 5. We're only going to highlight some of the most fun and successful films that have, as part of their plot, used time travel in one way or another to tell a great story. Here are the ten best according to Rotten Tomatoes. See full article at ScreenRant.com.
Would stepping on the first butterfly really change the history of
Gould's answer was the latter. In his view, unpredictable events played a major role in natural history. If you were to travel back in time and step on the first butterfly (reminiscent of the 1952 ...
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RELATED: 5 Horror Movies That Involve Time Travel. One of the first movies to masterfully employ the Butterfly Effect-style plotline was the1981 (though released only in 1987 due to political ...
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Iconic films like Back to the Future , The Time Machine, and Terminator 2 live in the hearts of many for being entertaining, fun, and brilliant in their use of time travel. Put the bad experiences ...
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Marty McFly, a 17-year-old high school student, is accidentally sent 30 years into the past in a time-traveling DeLorean invented by his close friend, the maverick scientist Doc Brown. Director: Robert Zemeckis | Stars: Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson, Crispin Glover. Votes: 1,302,583 | Gross: $210.61M.
What is the Butterfly Effect in Time Travel?
Butterfly Effect Movie. In 2004, a film starring Ashton Kutcher was released. In the film, the main lead, Evan was able to travel back in time and alter his time line ever so slightly. Every time he went back, the result had a major effect on his life In one turn of events, he would end up in prison ...
How The Butterfly Effect Violates Its Own Time Travel Rules
2004 sci-fi/horror movie The Butterfly Effect has its lead character repeatedly travel through time, but at one point breaks its own rules. Time travel stories are inherently difficult to keep straight, if only because time travel isn't a thing we can actually do, at least that anyone knows of. Thus, writers are forced to rely either on existing scientific theories, or make up their own rules ...
Time Travel, Parallel Universe, Butterfly Effect
A man accidentally gets into a time machine and travels back in time nearly an hour. Finding himself will be the first of a series of disasters of unforeseeable consequences. Director: Nacho Vigalondo | Stars: Karra Elejalde, Candela Fernández, Bárbara Goenaga, Nacho Vigalondo. Votes: 68,667 | Gross: $0.04M.
Butterfly Tale review
Still, if you can get past mutilating a wonder of nature, the movie is a harmless and rather sweet cartoon for under-eights. Teenager Patrick is a monarch who cannot fly because of an undeveloped ...

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