Usually, I hate movies like The Butterfly Effect. They scare me, plus I can't stand movies where things blow up and people die. But this time I almost enjoyed it--at least, it was definitely worth watching. The film doesn't just cover truth and lies, it covers reality and reality reworked.
The Butterfly Effect dives deeper into the realm of science fiction than Butler's novel Kindred, which deals with time travel in a more abstract and frightening way than the systematic journal entries in the film. While Dana is trapped in the eternal time paradox of "since it already happened, I can't change it," Evan can change the past, thereby affecting his future. Every time Evan goes into his past, he changes his reality, and damages his own brain. One could argue that this is all just in his mind and he's still in the hospital, except for the fact that he commits suicide in his mother's womb and the movie ends.
Evan probably should have just dealt with Kayleigh's suicide and not screwed everything up, but he did. Dana faces a similar problem, except that her stopping point was much later. After Hagar was born, Dana could have just let Rufus die, because her family was assured a future. But she kept getting dragged back, until she had to kill him and lose her arm in the process. Both Dana and Evan try increasingly hard to save someone (or several someones) but their quests get more and more futile, until Dana chooses to save herself over Rufus, and Evan saves everyone else over himself.
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