The Curse to manipulate the Time (Mild spoilers ahead!)
Probably, all of you must have thought at least once to go back in time when you think that everything in your life went south, and there is no way to turn things around. This movie is basically all about our main character trying to save his life`s love from her tragic endings by going back in time. However, there is more to it.
Before analyzing the movie any further, we should also mention some quick facts about the Butterfly Effect which is a part of the Chaos Theory in Theoretical Physics. The main idea is when anything insignificant such as a butterfly flapping its wings may have an adverse or significant effect on future events like hurricanes. To put it in another way, any action taken in the past may play a role in huge paradigm shifts changing the course of the events during that period of time. For example, if the former art teacher of a young Austrian boy did not demise his student`s talent and helped him how to improve his skills, maybe the Holocaust might not have occurred aftermath. Any rejection from the higher-ups may seem quite insignificant nowadays, however, the path followed by the course of events and individual actions might have a huge or small impact on the future, directly or indirectly.
As for our protagonist, he has a unique disease with blackouts followed by strong emotional swings or physical danger which is quite similar in a sense to Professor Banner when he turns into Hulk. The main difference is our main character can travel back in time using his memories when such incidents strike. This disease turned out to be genetic and it is only inherited from father to son as we can see in the sequels of this movie.
He wants to be with the girl of his life forever as every college student dreams in puberty. Sadly, the girl loses her life in a tragic incident, and in order to bring her back, our protagonist forces himself to change the course of time every single time. But doing so messes up things even more than ever which is due to the fact that even a slight re-interaction with the past will have a huge impact on the future timeline. Although the things, in the beginning, appear to be fine and dandy, there is always some twist.
On the other hand, the movie question indirectly the fact of what would happen if we were able to live in alternate universes within the same time frame and what would be those outcomes. Would the negative ones overweigh the positive ones or what if we had really thought and really good results at the same pace?
With such inhuman power, we could generate innumerable of the ideal partners we always wanted to be with or the career paths we could have chosen, the skill sets or hobbies we wanted to perform, or the places we could have visited and experience these non-existent events from the first-person view. Even if we have all of these earthly assets, then we still would urge ourselves to think what would happen if we had more/less or just, different.
Unluckily, deep time is only linear in physics and we cannot reverse the flow of time backward in practice, yet we can observe it such as via big telescopes. For example, when we look at a stellar object which is 5 light-years away from our system, we can basically see the image of it from 5 years ago. However, it is not possible to live these events at that specific moment in person.
Being one of the most memorable movies of Ashton Kutcher, this film has always accompanied me for almost 2 decades. And no matter how underrated this masterpiece is, it always deserves a solid place on the top shelves of every movie lover. It is a kind of movie that you can turn to every time whenever you think that you messed up things and find a weird sense of consolation after watching it. Furthermore, the awarded video game `The Life is Strange` with a beautiful narrative is also based on a similar topic, especially in a sense of time traveling and brain damage upon using such power.
To sum up the moral of the story, sometimes there are things we are not able to control. Therefore, all we can do is to focus on ourselves, seize the day and learn from our mistakes in order to prevent future mistakes and, finally be at peace with letting things go.
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This is one of my favorite time travel movies. The script is really clever and the narrative is interesting.
Excellent scifi film with strong drama. Sadly, the brand ended up being overmilked, but this one was certainly a worth watching film.