10 Movies That Thought They Were Smart (But Really Weren't)

6. The Butterfly Effect

Time travel is always a tricky subject, and even the best movies of the genre such as Back to the Future, The Terminator and Looper open themselves up to complaints about plot holes you could fly a 747 through. When it's handled less-diligently, though, as in the 2004 Ashton Kutcher-starring The Butterfly Effect, it's hard to persist with the rest of the movie, as the entire premise begins to collapse upon itself. Evan Treborn (Kutcher) discovers that he can travel back in time and alter past events in order to affect his future, so after he ends up in prison, he decides to convince his cell-mate of this by traveling back to his childhood and impaling his hands on two sharp objects. The result is that Evan instantly has scars on his hands, and his cell-mate believes him, but this defies the logic of everything we know about time travel. If this was the case, then Evan would have had the scars on his hands from the moment of the injury, and his cell-mate would not be aware of any change. In addition to this, there's a very strong possibility that Evan stabbing his own hands out of nowhere as a child would have completely changed his life path, as his family and friends would have had a completely different view of him as a person. Given that the movie is totally wrapped up in the idea of small incidents making gigantic ripples, it seems to trip over its own logic, and though the ambitious ideas are there, the movie just isn't as smart as it thinks it is.