The Butterfly Effect does a great job in the sheer sense of the film; but in terms of an ambitious work, it lacks capacity to carry much meaning. Fortunately, readers have their own Hamlet, can turn out different tricks.
It is said that this film has four endings, three of which are to meet the warm needs of the mass market, which are not worth mentioning; Evan in the director's cut version strangled himself as a baby is what Eric Bress wanted to express most. .
Life is constantly doing multiple-choice questions, and people's habitual thinking is often: looking for the best option. When this inertial thinking is placed in the present tense of the timeline, it becomes utilitarian realism; when it is placed in the future of the timeline, it becomes the opportunism of planning to move afterward; and once it is placed in the past tense of the timeline, it becomes utilitarian realism. Become greedy perfectionism. The dark side of human nature is exaggerated, remorse, stubbornness, and insatiable desire.
In fact, the depth of the script is still insufficient. Because the director uses a negative negation to end the question - how do we view all the past and all the imperfections of the past reflecting the unknown of reality? Its answer is: we have no choice, we can only perish; Lorenz's Chaos Theory reveals that making extremely small adjustments in the "past" of time will lead to unpredictable upheaval in the "future" of time; therefore, the intention is to pass The only consequence of changing the past to affect the present is - unknowable! Therefore, regret for past choices is meaningless, and it may not lead to a possibility of being better than the present; therefore, we can only admit that a perfect choice is completely impossible; in other words, even for events that have occurred in the past, There is also an insurmountable unknowableness for humans.
To break through this unknowability, humans must rely on more powerful supernatural beings, such as gods and superpowers. When the protagonist Evan possesses such supernatural power, he becomes a half-human and half-god existence: on the one hand, there is divine prophecy and modification power; on the other hand, there are human desires and feelings. Tragedy, then, is inevitable, like the mortal Greek gods who satisfy their desires by destroying subjective "imperfections."
There is reason to suspect that the writers have such a tendency: to further clarify the gap between man and god, and give the fantasist a big blow. Because man has no power of God, and God has no desire of man. So, you see it as a sci-fi movie, but it is actually a reality movie, so realistic that it destroys all imaginary unknowns; you see it is exploring human nature, in fact, people are exploring divinity.
If I was given a chance to have Evan's ability to change the ending, I hope this is the case: After countless revisions, Evan finally returned to the original situation, and this recovery has no accumulated memory, so he will Can only struggle in endless iterations of reincarnation - a big dream of a series of re-insertion, a tragic and enlightening ending.
The meaning may go even deeper: what if we were aware of the chasm of unknowability and the limitations of mortals, aren't we doing the same thing over and over again without knowing it? Thinkers may criticize this change of mine for being a bit of a hazy emptiness of the mandarin duck and butterfly school, but, sorry, I'm talking about movies here.
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