13 Brilliant Plot Twists That Couldn't Quite Save Terrible Movies
9. The Butterfly Effect - Evan Kills Himself In The Womb
The Twist: When Evan (Ashton Kutcher) realizes that he can revisit traumatic moments of his past and re-do them, he begins to change the future. Understandably, his actions have negative reverberations and often result in his and his friends’ lives being worse off than before. Eventually, Evan recognizes that his meddling is only making things worse.
To solve this problem, he removes himself by traveling back to the womb and strangling himself with his own umbilical chord, thus nullifying all of his actions.
Why It Almost Saved The Movie: In a sense, it didn’t because this was the ending of the director’s cut version of the film. Though both endings presented Evan finding a way to drastically remove himself from his friends’ lives, this was a more final, yet believable course.
In either version, the movie simply feels overly elaborate, and beyond that, extremely unpleasant. The traumas Evan undergoes are necessary to the plot but are just not fun to watch, no matter if they’re erased or not. The off-putting content of the film is unfortunate, because the idea of Ashton Kutcher saving the day by killing himself in the womb is just crazy enough to be fascinating.