This movie turned out a lot better than I had expected. I just never really took any movie that has Ashton Kutcher in it that seriously, as he always plays a goofball type role and this movie was about alternating the past. The premise just sounded ridiculous if not ricockulous. But IMDb gave it a rather high rating for an Ashton Kutcher movie and I decided to give it a try and I’ve wached and rewatched this movie about 3x, while rewatching some favorite parts about 6x.
The storyline was pretty easy to follow. A kid when young has these black outs. You find out his father has been institutionalized, but don’t really know why. When Evans was young, he hung around some bad kids, but also the girl he’ll eventually end up falling deeply in love with. Lenny, one of his friends gets psychologically scarred for life, but Evans doesn’t exactly remember why. Some time later, he also leaves the city because his mother deemed it to be the best for him.
Fast forward 8 years or so, Evans in college and one night when told to read from his journals by a date, he zooms back into time during one of his blackouts and sees everything that went on as clear as light.
He tries a different blackout time and notices a scar appear where there used to be no scar at all. He goes visit his old friends and ends up causing the girl to suicide as she was forced to remember how her own father had molested her when she was a child.
Evans being devasted by this event and the fact that her brother, a sadistic sicko was out to get him, thinks he can try manipulating the past and he suceeds, and a portion of his brain where memory is stored, recreates 14 years of memories just like that. The pain and brain damage was shown by his nose bleeding.
So the next hour or so is him trying to go back in time and fixing things up more and more.
The 1st time, he ends up in bed with Katie (the childhood girl) and now he’s in a frat (which he used to despise with a passion) and Katie is in a sorority. However, he finds out due to the fact that Katie was no longer harmed when she was a child, her father and saved up all for her brother, which turned out to be a worse sicko than before and ended up breaking Evan’s car and tried to beat the crap out of him. As a self defense, he attacked Tom (brother’s name) and ended up killing him. He goes to jail for this and once again, he tries to change history.
This time, he goes back to the time where Tom is about to burn his dog. He gives Lenny a shard of metal which he tells him to use to cut the rope. However, Evans was able to convince Tom not to burn his dog this time, but Lenny ends up sticking the shard of metal into Tom’s back, killing him. In this version, Katie gets so overwhelmed with sadness, she ends up becoming a prostitute just to spite Evans. Lenny ends up institionalized, strapped in bed, not able to move.
Once again, Evans goes back and tries again. This time, he tries to warn the mom and baby before they get blown up to pieces by their prank. When Evans wakes up, he finds out that he had lost both his hands (due to the explosion), Katie was now dating Lenny (who is now his roommate in College), and Tom became a religious freak (well, they used the word spiritual) after he saved the mom and baby during that incident. Of course Evans was pissed at this outcome, but he thought it might’ve been for the better now that everyone is happy (well, besides him). Then he finds out his mom has lung cancer because she started smoking after Evans lost his arms to cope with stress.
Evans tries again, this time returning to the video camera scene with Katie’s father. This time, instead of telling him to stay away from the daughter, he goes finds the explosive, lights it, and accidentally blows up Katie. He wakes up institutionalized (not as stringent as Lenny, but I wonder why). Maybe because it was accidental vs Lenny’s on purpose. Either way, apparently his journals are no longer available. He was like crap, Katie’s dead and I’m stuck here in this institution. What can he do? He really panics. He keeps demanding the journals from his doctor and mom, but they both claim there was no such thing, which makes sense since he really only started the journal the day of that incident, so it would only have 1 page, probably something the mother would’ve thrown away already. Is he trapped in this version forever?
He later finds out his father, having this same disease kept on demanding for a photo album, which made he rethink what he was able to travel back in time with. He asked his mom to bring him his old home made movies and with one final attempt (before he kills himself?). He mentioned in his final letter that if someone reads that letter, he would be dead, but the instution wouldn’t have killed him, so he must’ve planned on doing it himself. This was a video of when Evans and Katie first met at someone’s birthday party. Earlier on, you find out the only reason why Katie stayed with her father (her parents were divorced) was because she liked Evans and wanted to stay with him instead of moving far away with her mother. Tom wanted to be with his sister and stayed with the father too. So he whispers into Katie’s ears saying that he hates her and wants to kill her family. She runs of crying and the dream ends there.
Evans wakes up back in college. Lenny was his roommate and was drawing something (airplane design presumably). Evans asks where’s Katie and Lenny has no idea who Katie was. 8 years later, while walking down some street in New York (presumably any big metropolitan city would work, but the buildings look very NYish), Katie and Evans walk by each other. Katie seems to remember something, turns around, stares at Evans for awhile, and continues walking. Evans does the same thing. It is unknown if Evans has a girlfriend or even a wife yet. He did say ‘love you’ on the cell phone but that could be to his mom, but it’s totally understandable either way, since he’s a shrink already. If they could somehow tie in all the previous versions and how they’re still part of everyone into the sequel, that might be interesting. I mean obviously something in Katie is triggering her to try to remember something.
Anyway, with the whole storyline given away, I did have some things I wanted to throw out.
First off, each character has 3 phases: kid, teenager, and young adult. Most of the characters were chosen pretty well besides Tom. I was shocked that they chose to use Cameron Bright as the kid Tom. One thing, both latter versions of Tom had blond hair, but Cameron has brown hair. Second, when they moved to Jesse James as teenage Tom, he seemed to be smaller than Cameron!
Another thing was during the memory recreation, I thought it was really odd that we were able to see Tom and Katie growing up and even giving his valedictorian speech, since Evans should’ve no longer had any contact with either one of them, that part of the memory should just not exist. I understand they wanted to show us what happened to them, but it shouldn’t have worked to make the plot bulletproof.
Then of course there was this whole blackout issue. There seems to be 2 types of blackouts, one which were induced by stress and the pressure of the situation. The second one was for convenience for returning. There’s a big hole with the following. I can understand the former where he returns to the stressful environment to change the past, but the latter involves his future self returning to his past to change it. I might not have described that correctly, but let me show you in the following example:
When he returned to his kindergarten class, he drew picture of him killing the two jail mates. This drawing was shown to the mother in his first version of reality which didn’t have any changes yet. However, that meant that this specific time was chosen in the future to return to, creating a circular dependency which should not be allowed (past depended on future knowledge to be able to make that drawing and future depended on past to have a blackout during that time).
Another similar situation was when he took a knife from the kitchen which he was planning to kill Katie’s father with (I presume). Once again, ciruclar dependency occurs.
Then there was the incident with the father. He had asked his father for help, but when he was rejected because the father wanted it to end with him, he told his father he’ll succeed where his father had failed, but changing the past until it was perfect. This has prompted his father to try to kill him. Once again, another circular dependency.
One thing I never got was why Evans never went looking for Katie after the final revision. He could’ve started anew, but I guess he wanted to avoid her at all cost and not try to ruin anyone’s life again. I guess this is what we call 剋星 (someone that just jinxes you whenever they’re around).
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