SPOILER ALERT! Do not read the following if you haven't seen the movie. It will ruin the experience.
The basic premise of The Butterfly Effect is that Evan (Ashton Kutcher) has discovered a method of traveling back into his past (by reading diary entries that he wrote during his childhood) where he hopes that, by changing certain events in the past, he can favorably control the destinies of himself and his friends. However, he fails to realize the far-reaching extent of the changes that he makes.
Shortly after the film opens, we flashback to thirteen years earlier. We meet Evan and learn that the 8 year old has been experiencing blackouts that cause memory loss. We also meet Evan's friends, Lenny, Kayleigh, and her brother, Tommy. The four grow up to be lifelong friends. These four friends will be the film's central characters and throughout the movie we will visit them at various stages throughout their childhood and adulthood.
There are several segments involving Evan and his friends that turn out to be very significant (or traumatic) events in Evan's life. In fact, most, if not all, of these events were blacked out by Evan, only to be revisited by him later. Most of these segments will be entry and/or exit points in Evan's time travels. We will cover these in more detail later.
On the recommendation of his psychologist, Evan keeps journals of his everyday life in the hopes that it will help unlock the mystery of the cause of his blackouts.
We now go to present day, as Evan is a college student. His girlfriend discovers his journals and she encourages him to read one of the passages. As he begins to read a passage, he notices that the room begins to blur and he finds himself at 13 years of age. The passage he is reading (we'll call it the junkyard event) is about a time when he, Kayleigh and Lenny were walking through a junkyard. He recognizes this as one of the events that he had blacked out in his childhood. They walk upon Tommy who has Evan's dog tied up in a burlap bag and is threatening to light the bag on fire. As Evan tries to stop Tommy from lighting the bag, Tommy hits Evan with a stick. Lenny is unable to untie the bag in a timely fashion and is traumatized by the whole event. Evan blacks out and awakens back in current time on his bed in the dorm room.
Not sure if the event was real or a dream, Evan returns to visit Lenny to find that he is somewhat mentally disturbed, obviously still traumatized by the event. Realizing that the junkyard event did indeed actually happened, Evan suddenly realizes that he can use the journal entries as time portals. He can read a particular passage from the journal, and return to that point in his life.
To test it, he reads another passage. He awakens back at 13 years of age to another traumatic event in his life (we'll call it the dynamite in the mailbox event). As a prank, Evan and his three friends had planted a stick of dynamite in a neighbor's mailbox. The prank goes horribly awry however. Just before the dynamite explodes, the homeowner drives up with her baby and decides to check the mail. As she is approaching the mailbox, the four perpetrators cut and run. Evan wakes in current time to the realization that he can change the events when he travels back to a prior event. And he realizes that he can return with his adult mind and voice.
Evan returns to his hometown to visit Kayleigh, whom he hasn't seen in years. He begins to question her about a particular event from when they were children. Kayleigh's father videotaped a kiddie-porn movie of the two of them without their clothes on (we'll call this the kiddie-porn incident). Evan realizes that this was another event that he had blacked out when he was a kid. Evan now returns to current day.
Evan receives notice that Kayleigh has killed herself because of the trauma brought about by the kiddie-porn incident. He now makes the decision to travel back and change the events that lead to her suicide. He reads a passage from his journal that takes him back to 8 years old when Kayleigh's father was making the kiddie-porn movie of them. Evan threatens Kayleigh's father and tells him that he should raise his daughter in a respectable manner.
Evan now wakes up in current time and finds himself in bed with Kayleigh. It turns out that Kayleigh's father listened to Evans advice about the way to raise his daughter, so she is now a fine respectable person and the two are dating while they attend college. All fine and dandy, right?
Well, it turns out that, following Evan's threats to stop abusing his daughter, Kayleigh's father had turned his perversion away from Kayleigh but towards her brother Tommy, who is now a disturbed young man. Evan and Tommy end up in a scuffle. Evan hits Tommy with a baseball bat, killing him, and landing himself in prison for his actions.
In prison, Evan reads one of his journal entries that takes him back to the aforementioned junkyard event. He wants to change the outcome, so, knowing that they must be prepared this time, he grabs a piece of metal and hands it to Lenny and instructs him to cut the rope on the bag freeing the dog. But during the ensuing struggle, Lenny stabs and kills Tommy with the piece of metal.
When he returns to current day, Evan finds that Lenny is institutionalized due to the traumatic event and Kayleigh is a strung-out drug addict. Once again, the changes he made with the intention of correcting the past wrongs, backfire, making it actually worse.
So, Evan must now return to the past and change it again. He returns to the dynamite in the mailbox event. He runs towards the mailbox and shouts at the mother and baby. As he nears the mailbox, it explodes. He awakens to find himself in current day in the hospital, missing his arms. His mother, distraught, at his injuries, begins to smoke again eventually causing lung cancer. Guess what...he returns to the past to try again. Getting ridiculous yet?
He goes back to the kiddie-porn event. In trying to threaten Kayleigh's father into not harming anyone, he lights a stick of dynamite, but Kayleigh picks it up. Evan returns to the present to find himself in a psychiatric ward and Kayleigh dead. He asks his doctor for his journals so that he can return to the past to change it again. But his doctor informs him that there are no journals! All of his memories are delusions brought about by his guilt from Kayleigh's death. In this newest time travel, it seems that Evan has not kept journals. So he has no way of going back to change it. But he discovers that old home movie of the family will do just fine.
He watches an old home movie that takes him back to his early, early childhood, even before any of the other events. He walks up to a young Kayleigh and tells her that he hates her and never wants to see her again.
As he returns back to the present he realizes that Kayleigh is not a part of their lives. He decided that the best way to end it at this point is to leave it as if they never met. That is the closest he can get it to "normal".
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