Why did Evan draw that violent picture? I understand the function of the pic (I think) being in the movie but I don’t know what caused the character to draw it.
What was the significance of the drawing (maybe this is the more operative question here)?
I think the significance of the drawing was to give the audience a clue of what’s happening during the blackouts. The drawing is far too good to have been done by your average eight-year-old.
Well, spoilers ahoy!
I got the impression that the scary picture was drawn by the adult Evan during his flashback just because he remembered the fuss about it from when he was a child, i.e. he remembered as a child being told he’d drawn a scary picture, and when he time-travelled back to that point, he drew the picture simply to fulfill history.
Considering the premise and title of the movie (tiny changes in the past, as in the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, can cause massive changes to the present) that particular flashback is problematic. Evan goes back solely to inflict some scars on his palms, to convince his religious cellmate. Seems to me that drawing a scary picture is one thing, but drawing a scary picture and deliberately impaling one’s palms on some spikes would be the kind of childhood event that can completely change one’s life, which might include not ending up in prison pending charges of manslaughter. Besides, I thought the changes became retroactive. The scars shouldn’t suddenly appear in Evan’s palms; from the con’s perspective, they should have been there the whole time.
Why is he in prison, anyway? A popular frat boy defends himself by killing an ex-con assailant with the assailant’s own weapon, and after the assailant uses the weapon a few times on the frat-boy (Evan’s instant recovery from a bat to the leg was a bit odd) and can’t even get bail?
I thought the move was going reasonably well, though the time-travel bits were increasingly improbable (the scene with Evan’s father, though, when Dad immediately recognizes that he’s talking to his adult son, struck me as the best moment in the movie) and the single biggest weak point was during the second-to-last jump when Evan accidently blows up Kayleigh. Evan knows how destructive this stick of dynomite can be, so it seems ridiculous that he would light it, putting himself, Kayleigh and Tommy at risk. The more logical thing to do would be to destroy the stick by yanking out the fuse or breaking it in half, or making it unavailable (i.e. flushing it down a toilet or hiding it where it won’t be later found). Then, the horrific act of vandalism can’t happen.
In any case, it was a far more interesting movie than Master and Commander.
What I wanna know is…
[spoiler]…how come he didn’t go after the girl when they sorta bump into eachother at the end of the movie?
Could a woman not get over it when as a young girl, a new kid says something mean to her? Or did the dude decide to let bygones be bygones?
[/spoiler]
Also, does this movie make you wonder that if…
…he could go back in time just by reading documentation on any event he partook of, or watching a film about same… he could do it again, even though he burned the journals?
Only if he’d had a childhood blackout at the time.
I noticed when I watched the movie the second time, that the knife murderer depicted in the drawing looked a lot like Evan’s dad, Jason.
The more I think about it, the doctor at Sunnybrook talked about sedating Jason before allowing Evan to meet him, implying that Jason was dangerous. Perhaps Jason had knifed a few people, and that was why he was institutionalized. Maybe when Evan’s teacher told the class to draw what they wanted to be, and most kids naturally would tend to draw what their parents did… I don’t know, but it would be interesting to see a sequel/prequel explaining some of the more interesting questions. Of course, if there is one, it probably would only leave us with far more questions, and few answers like the Matrix movies did.
By the way, there is another thread with spoilers and questions about this movie, but I don’t know how to link to it.
Red Matrix
[spolier]
In the second-to-last scenario, Kayleigh confesses that the only reason she stayed with the Evil Dad when her parents got divorced is cause she didn’t want to leave Evan behind.
So… by being mean to her in that moment, they never become friends. So, she & Tommy choose their mom in the divorce, hence the happy-normal childhood montage.
When he sees her in the street at the very end, she doesn’t know who he is (she apparently gets “a funny feeling” for a sec)
[/spoiler]
Okay, I just saw it for the second time, and I can’t help pointing out something about the picture that went past me (and maybe you guys, unless you just haven’t mentioned it because it’s so obvious) the first time:It’s a drawing of Evan standing over the bodies of Skinhead and Blondie, the two white supremacist gang members, after he stabbed them to get his journal pages back. Evan already planned to shiv them when he approached the Jesus guy for help, so I guess it’s what was on his mind when he went back in the classroom. (Myself, I would have gone with scribbling “Invest in Microsoft in 1986, if you know what’s good for you” in crayola, but hey, whatever works for ya.)
Also, some speculation about the decision at the end:Since the time-travelling blackout disease is apparently hereditary, maybe Evan took his father’s dying words, “It must end with me” to heart, and he’s decided it’s really important that he never reproduce? Okay, maybe a vasectomy would be a little more practical that shunning your ideal mate forever, but I think towards the end of that whole deal he (understandably, I guess) developed something of a martyr/saviour complex. 
But, I believe it’s because he went back in time, that he had those black outs. Having the blackouts didn’t occour because of a traumatic event in young evan’s life – take the kitchen/knife scene… it was pretty mundane and he got blacked out (cuz old Evan jumped into his brain). that’s MHO anyways.
MY theory is that the original timeline that we see as the main character grows up and all is actually not the original timeline and that a version of him in this other timeline goes back to draw that order to get close to his Dad (because maybe his dad died at different way before he got to meet him and he realized he needed to meet him) there’s a lot of stuff that negates this, like the doc saying that it’s accurate that his brain has 40 years of jammed knowledges (could’ve been an exaggeration cause it’s unlikely that he knew any where near the exact # of years) and the fact that we only follow prime main character and he retains nearly all the memories so what version did this, the only way around this that I see if some weird grandfather paradoxxing that doesn’t apply like he was supposed to find time travel later on in his timeline but because the other timeline made that change of meeting his father (butterfly effect) he found his abilities earlier than originally and starts the process earlier and then before the timeline can catch up, he goes back to that day in the classroom (in prison) and draws the drawing again cause he doesn’t wanna waste time and that’s the only thing that came to mind. Again this adds to the grandfather paradox cause how could prime main character solidify the drawing in his timeline if he erased the timeline that originally drew it. Thank you