I had never seen The Butterfly Effect before we watched it in class, and I have to say; it scared the living shit out of me. It was twisted and weird, and it reminded me in a lot of ways of Memento. It kind of had the same underlying question: "If you couldn't remember the horrible things you did and/or witnessed, would you want to know what happened?"

In both movies, the main character had memory problems and spent the movie trying to put things together using the notes they left for themselves. They had different purposes though. Leonard wanted revenge, while Evan wanted to fix everything and was willing to sacrifice himself in the process.

Another thing I thought this movie seemed to bring up was the idea of nature vs. nurture. I remember learning in psychology the idea of whether people were born evil or if the way they were raised had an effect on their personalities. This movie clearly said that it was nurture that decided it, the most obvious example being with Tommy (my dad's name is Thomas Miller so it was super creepy seeing his headstone). In all the different situations, Tommy was either completely evil or a Jesus freak. Complete polar opposites, just so we are sure to notice the differences. If he was raised by his dad (who was really hard on him) he turned evil, but with his kind and loving mom he was religious and saintly.

Same with Kayleigh. Depending on how she was raised, she ended up being either a sorority girl (who obviously made it to college) vs. a waitress or crack-whore. If she was intelligent enough to get into college, then that shouldn't have changed unless her dad's version of raising her was really that horrible.