Here's one for you time travel junkies. This one looks pretty cool, but that's just my opinion, and you know what they say about them !!

http://www.butterflyeffectmovie.com/

What's interesting to me is that the Disney Channel's Lilo & Stitch series recently had an episode with the same theme. They even used a butterfly for the pivot point on which events turned -- and presented a rather apocalyptic future in one bit when Stitch set the controls on the time machine incorrectly (so that he and Lilo went into the future rather than the past).

I wonder how many people seeing the trailer wonder what the heck the title means.

Qapla'

SSB

Time machines, butterflies... I hope Ray Bradbury is getting his cut...

Time machines, butterflies... I hope Ray Bradbury is getting his cut...


I'm not sure Ray had much to do with developing the chaos theory :freak:

No, Ray wrote a short story that did!

Time traveler hunters where one wondered off and killed a butterfly and then the future was changed.

Actually a movie based on "A Sound of Thunder" is coming out but radically different from Bradbury's short story.
http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/art-main.html?2004-01/07/11.00.film
Lest anyone starts piling on the film-makers, that short, short story would have to be padded somehow to even a 90 minute movie.

As for "The Butterfly Effect", I'm not a fan of the conceit where one can "will" themselves back in time a la "Somewhere in Time". That's the impression I got from the trailer tho' I must confess I wasn't paying alot of attention and the trailer's sound mix seem to have the dialogue mostly obfuscated.

As I understand it, "The Butterfly Effect" describes a facet of Chaos Theory in regards to changing the past and has little to nothing to do w/the excellent Bradbury short story "The Sound of Thunder" - which I believe is being made into a movie. :thumbsup:


- - - - - -

Jeffrey Griffin
Griffworks Shipyards (http://members.aol.com/Griffworks/shipyards.html)

* * * * * *
Star Trek Scale Modeling WebRing (http://q.webring.com/hub?ring=startrekscalemod)

Actually the "Butterfly Effect" has nothing to do with changing the past. It is simply a metraphor for little things causing ever growing changes. Chaos theory is based on the idea that little things do exactly this in all things. It can and has been applied to story ideas about time travel, but the theory originated in theoretical mathematics first and is part of fractal theory.

Eric

And they just *happened* to coin a slang term that purely by chance seems to refer to the best-known SF story using the basic idea...

And just maybe the movie got the title from the story and not the theory? Or it could be a chicken and egg thing with the stories and chaos theory getting the name from another source.

however the idea is not even new, see:
http://www.duke.edu/~mjd/chaos/chaosh.html

Or for how the "Butterfly Effect" was exsplained and used in chaos theory.
http://www.imho.com/grae/chaos/chaos.html
http://www.cmp.caltech.edu/~mcc/chaos_new/Lorenz.html

The point is that in chaos theory it is an actual representation of what we see on a daily basis, not time travel. However since "A Sound of Thunder" was published ten years before Professor Lorenz's paper was, it's possible that the name came from that, but however, "the butterfly effect" is related to Chaos Theory, not the "Sound of Thunder Effect"

eric

Actually the "Butterfly Effect" has nothing to do with changing the past. It is simply a metraphor for little things causing ever growing changes. Chaos theory is based on the idea that little things do exactly this in all things. It can and has been applied to story ideas about time travel, but the theory originated in theoretical mathematics first and is part of fractal theory.

Eric
And just maybe the movie got the title from the story and not the theory? Or it could be a chicken and egg thing with the stories and chaos theory getting the name from another source.

however the idea is not even new, see:
http://www.duke.edu/~mjd/chaos/chaosh.html

Or for how the "Butterfly Effect" was exsplained and used in chaos theory.
http://www.imho.com/grae/chaos/chaos.html
http://www.cmp.caltech.edu/~mcc/chaos_new/Lorenz.html

The point is that in chaos theory it is an actual representation of what we see on a daily basis, not time travel. However since "A Sound of Thunder" was published ten years before Professor Lorenz's paper was, it's possible that the name came from that, but however, "the butterfly effect" is related to Chaos Theory, not the "Sound of Thunder Effect"

eric
I, of course, stand corrected. What I get for trying to read responses while doing the job. :o

After posting, I got to thinking more indepth about where I'd heard the theory and then remembered that it was more the "cause and effect" principle of chaos theory, as illustrated in the below paragraph from the second link that Eric K gives above:

This is an illustration of the butterfly effect - the idea in meteorology that the flapping of a butterfly's wing will create a disturbance that in the chaotic motion of the atmosphere will become amplified eventually to change the large scale atmospheric motion, so that the long term behavior becomes impossible to forecast.
I recall reading a story on time travel some years ago which used "The Butterfly Effect" to describe possible alternate universes which had splintered from the "real universe" due to a choice made at a crucial juncture, with the whole "flapping of the wings" thing used as just one possible example.

Anyhow, from the trailer, it doesn't look like the title has much in relation to the theory of the same name. However, I'm still willing to give it a try when it comes out. :)

- - - - - -

Jeffrey Griffin
Griffworks Shipyards (http://members.aol.com/Griffworks/shipyards.html)

* * * * * *
Star Trek Scale Modeling WebRing (http://q.webring.com/hub?ring=startrekscalemod)

I like to think of the past as immutable.

If someone has travelled to the past and done stuff, it's happened already.

Also if time travel to the past were possible at some far future time, why haven't people been popping in and out like on I Dream of Genie?

Maybe this explains UFO's, ghosts, and celebrity bowling.

>Also if time travel to the past were possible at some far future time, why haven't people been popping in and out like on I Dream of Genie?



Who says i haven't? :jest:

Eric

Well having seen it I must say my low expectations were exceeded.
More drama than scifi, unsubtle in some places but alright by me.
The conclusion seemed like the right choice too.

Saw it yesterday!

GREAT movie! :thumbsup:

The time-traveling aspect was sci-fi/fantasy -- kind of a Twilight Zone sort of thing. It was very well executed and does get one to wondering about the choices made in life and the effects they have on others.

The acting was really well done though it was very realistically vulgar and sick at times.

Sorry to dredge up this old topic but I just saw the film this weekend. I rented from Netflix and although the menu said that two versions of the film were included, the theatrical version was not. I had heard that there were two different endings (actually four with the alternate deleted ones.) Can anyone fill me in on the theatrical ending? The ending I saw, the directors cut, was where Evan goes back to his mother's womb and strangles himself with his umbilical cord, therefore negating his existence. I guess he never finds out if this final adjustment turns out OK!

Sorry to dredge up this old topic but I just saw the film this weekend. I rented from Netflix and although the menu said that two versions of the film were included, the theatrical version was not. I had heard that there were two different endings (actually four with the alternate deleted ones.) Can anyone fill me in on the theatrical ending? The ending I saw, the directors cut, was where Evan goes back to his mother's womb and strangles himself with his umbilical cord, therefore negating his existence. I guess he never finds out if this final adjustment turns out OK!
Chuck, you need to flip over the DVD to watch either version. When you place the movie in the dvd player it should have ask you which version you want from the menu you highlighted it and if you will be prompt to change dvd sides.

Mike

Kind of off-topic, but...is there a way to read what's in Chuck's "spoiler alert" box besides trying to quote the post? I ran the cursor over it, tried to click it, left-clicked it, it doesn't come up. I only saw it because when I tried to quote the post, it became visible inside the HTML brackets.

I'm not getting a "pop-up blocked" message either. The thread loads with "done, but with errors on page".

Come to think of it, I tried to post a spoiler a couple of months ago and it wouldn't post - got everything but the spoiler, and I gave up trying.

I'm not getting a "pop-up blocked" message either. The thread loads with "done, but with errors on page".

Me either, but IE flags an error for this page. Looking it up it seems there the html is missing a paranthesis ")". Not from the post but in the background HTML that vBulletin generates. Hello Hank? testing?

ssgt-cheese, thanks, but the Netflix disc is one-sided. I don't know why, usually the versions that they send out are the complete ones.

I did get the answer from chiangkaishecky in a PM, but I still wondered How did he get back to that point in time? For the directors cut, since his journals no longer existed, he watched a home movie of his mother being wheeled into the delivery room. Was it a home movie of when he first met Kayleigh? Maybe it'd be easier for me to just go to Blockbuster! :lol:

Oh wait, that spoiler tag works!