Movie Reviews: Butterfly Effect and Lady in the Water

Butterfly Effect: Thumbs up

I was expecting this to be a teenie-bopper, MTV-style psuedo-drama.  "Oh no, Ashton Kutcher is in a wheelchair.  Isn't that sad?  Now Amy Smart will have sex with him."

Not exactly.

This movie is one of the smartest and most interesting I've seen in a while.  Ashton plays a troubled boy who apparently has a mental disorder.  His father is in the asylum.  He keeps blanking out during important events in his life.  But when he gets to college, he figures out a way to go back and relive those events.  And that's when it gets REALLY interesting.

The term "butterfly effect" obviously refers to the element of chaos theory that if a butterfly flaps its wings in New York, it could cause a typhoon in Tokyo.  This movie deals with causality and how hard it is to control things in the real world.  It gets into a multiple-reality kind of thing, similar to Run Lola Run.  And at the end, the character learns his lesson.  Fun movie.

Lady in the Water: Thumbs down

I've often noticed that if you have low expectations for a movie, it's easy to be pleased, but if you have high expectations for a movie, you're more likely to be disappointed.  After The Village, I had high expectations for this movie and M. Night Shaymalan disappointed me.  I'm starting to think his strength is as a screenwriter, not a director.  Parts of the movie were beautifully done, and he wove in a lot of interesting symbolism and subtle themes.  But there were two huge problems with the movie: transition and pacing.

As everyone should know at this point, the movie starts out in the mundane world and then transitions into fantasy.  The fantasy is played out in the mundane world, but there's clearly something fantastic going on.  The problem is, the characters never have a moment of transition.  One minute the fantasy is not believable, and the next minute it is.  The audience needs a moment for transition.  Hold the camera on the character's face and watch him as he experiences the revelation.  Play some grand-sounding music.  Let us see that a transition has occured.  The failure to do that is just sloppy directing.

The second problem is timing.  The first part of the movie, as the characters are figuring things out, drags.  The second part, where all the important things happen, goes too quickly.  Important characters make important realizations and it's dealt with in a matter of seconds.  Again, Shaymalan doesn't dwell on the right moments.  This problem could have been solved with better editing, but it also has to do with camera angles.  Again, he needed to linger on certain characters and certain situations, to give it a chance to sink in with the audience.

That being said, the movie isn't as bad as critics say it is.  Yelena and I suspected that most people wouldn't understand the movie, and we were right.  It is a fantastic tail with some very interesting ideas.  It was clearly meant as a bedtime story for his own children; after the credits, a notice comes up: "OK, I'll tell the story one more time.  And then it's time for bed."  Cute.

Also, I think the idea of couching the fantastic in the mundane world was intentional.  Certain characters come out: the Symbolist, the Guardian, the Healer, etc.  These individuals are not heroes; they are normal people who have been given roles in this fantastic situation.  By doing this, Shaymalan is trying to say that even the real world can become fantastic; even small children staring at cereal boxes can have a chance to be important.  The creatures look like something drawn in a children's book; they're hardly believable.  But I think that's part of the point: maintaining this as a children's story--although one that is told in a rather adult fashion.

Ultimately I think Shaymalan has tried to do too much and not enough at the same time.  The shortcomings of this movie are basic things, he should have known better.  I suspect he got too caught up in the idea to pay much attention to the execution.

And I was disappointed with Bryce Dallas Howard.  She is gorgeous, but her beauty is not used very effectively.  And she took a simple character and played it simply.  She could have put a lot more effort into the role than she did.  I had high expectations of her after The Village.  Still, she's young and just getting started in Hollywood.  She has plenty of room for growth, and I look forward to her next movie (Shaymalan's as well).