Plot synopsis
Evan is a young boy, who suffers from memory blackouts when experiencing traumatic events. His therapist asks him to keep a diary of these moments, so he can remember what happens.
When he is a young adult, he starts to read one of his old diaries and falls into a trance. He then begins to re-experience the event in his diary but with his adult point of view. He is able to change the past for the better.
When he comes out of the trance, this small but significant change in his past has had major consequences in his present!
Evan’s father, who had the same ability and ended up in a mental home, tries to warn Evan. He says that the more attempts that he makes to fix the mistakes of the past, the more problems he will create in the present. It seems this genetic defect is passed down from father to son.
At the end of the film, to prevent himself from also going mad, he goes back to the womb and strangles himself with the cord, before he can be born.
His mother had had two stillbirths before him, so presumably these sons had gone back and also committed suicide in the same way.
The story ends with the lives of his childhood friends, Lenny, Kayleigh and Tommy turning out much better without him being born; his mother even gives birth to a baby, who cannot have the genetic defect because she is a girl.
My comments
The original cinema release of this film had a different ending: Evan goes back to the point when he and Kayleigh first met as children. He threatens to harm her and her family if she ever talks to him again, which causes the timeline to diverge.
This means Kayleigh and her brother, Tommy, don’t have to grow up living with their evil father, and that their friend, Lenny, grows up without being bullied. They all go on to live happy well-adjusted lives.
The film ends when eight years later, Kayleigh and Evan pass on a street with a feeling of déjà vu but keep walking.
Rutgers biophysicist Troy Shinbrot says, “If [Evan] had a better model for the system that is his life, perhaps he could have chosen better outcomes. But then the movie wouldn’t be very interesting.”[1]
Successfully changing the past but making things worse in the future is also the theme of the film, Retroactive (1997).
Summary of time travel
When Evan travels back, he easily makes changes, so the past is open. When he returns to his present, the timeline has strongly diverged. This would suggest an open past, open future model of time with a diverging timeline.
However, on one occasion, he went back in time, made some changes, but on his return, nothing had changed, so it seems a double-well timeline was being used in this film.
Category of time travel
Psychological: psychosis.
Model of time
Open past, open future with a double-well timeline.
[1] Chodos, A. (2004). Butterflies, Tornadoes, and Time Travel. Retrieved 12 Apr 2009, from http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200406/butterfly-effect.cfm