As part
of our sci-fi film series, we watched the movie “The Butterfly Effect” this evening. This movie was unique in that its plot is centered around the character Evan Treborn’s ability to travel back in time. Evan, who suffered severe “blackouts” as a child under moments of high stress, finds his diaries depicting the minutes leading up to his blackouts. The rest of the movie documents his attempts to travel back in time to re-do certain aspects of his past.
All of his meddling actions that he takes within the time 
frame of his blackouts change the future once he comes back from going back to the past. As he continues to do this, he realizes although he has good intentions, his actions yield unintended consequences. And eventually, Evan suffers brain damage from all of his time travel and as well ruins the lives of those he loves in attempts to spare them from what he thought was a worse future. Ultimately, he decides that his attempts to alter the past end up severely harming those he cares about, so he goes back to the moment he met his love interest to prevent her from ever being involved with him.
The title
is a reference to the butterfly effect, which is a theory that seemingly unimportant events such as a flap of a butterfly’s wings will have larger consequences in the grand scheme of time. This movie raises thought-provoking questions on the ethics of time travel and its consquences of manipulating the events that fate has in store for us.