When I agreed to see The Butterfly Effect, it was mostly because I was curious to see if Ashton Kutcher is more than a pretty face and the leader of the trucker hat fashion cult.

Amy Smart, William Lee Scott and Elden Henson star with Kutcher as the college-aged version of a group of childhood friends. Plagued by blackouts throughout his childhood, Evan Treborn (Kutcher) finds a way to eventually recall those memories and manipulate their contents to alter his current life. The movie's main theme is how changing one's past can severely alter the reality of the present.

I came to several conclusions while watching the movie, and first and probably most unbelievable: Kutcher can act. He is very believable as a confused college kid that quantum leaps through different possible versions of his life.

Smart, who plays Evan's sometime girlfriend Kayleigh (depending on which version of his life we're watching), can be harder to accept. While Kutcher's character remains the same in spite of the changing circumstances, Smart changes with the scenery, giving her character so many emotional highs and lows that when she does get to play a more stable role, she seems fidgety.

While the movie is based on the "butterfly effect" -- a concept, which states that if a butterfly flaps its wings halfway around the world, there could be a monsoon -- it doesn't really explore that theme. When Evan changes the past, he only affects the present reality within his close circle of friends. While this may be seen as a flagrant hole in the plot, it actually works to the movie's advantage: It keeps the flashbacks, flash-forwards and all the changing realities easier for the audience to digest.

It's easy to see the movie as repetitive. Each set of circumstances is used to repeatedly drive home the same point: Change is bad. But it's just as easy to become completely engrossed in the movie, feeling for the characters and trying to figure out if there's any right way for the conflict to work itself out.

The most glaring errors in The Butterfly Effect are only visible after leaving the theater, when the viewer really starts to think. My biggest post-movie watching, too-much-thinking problem was that the filmmakers brought up too many deep questions that they probably didn't mean to touch on. Is it possible to change things for the better for everyone involved, or will someone's happiness always have to be sacrificed? And if they were trying to say that Evan shouldn't have messed with things in the first place, then why does it all work out in the end?

Despite those questions, and despite any Kutcher qualms or fear of a sci-fi/fantasy film (this movie falls into neither of those genres), The Butterfly Effect is a good movie. If you starting thinking too much afterwards and questioning its merit, go watch Dude, Where's My Car? After that, you'll never think again.