MovieChat Forums > Yesterday (2019) Discussion > No “butterfly effect” in this movie

No “butterfly effect” in this movie


Obviously there would be all kinds of things that would be different as the main characters probably wouldn’t even exist, much less have a nearly identical relationship, if the Beatles never existed. But perhaps the most glaring issue is that Oasis came to not exist (a funny joke), but his cover of their song was what got the two principal characters together when they were kids! I really thought they were going to have some kind of scene addressing that.

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perhaps the Oasis song was the butterfly effect. the original timeline has him playing Wonderwall, a cover, Ellie likes it and decides to become his manager, etc, but no romantic interest throughout the years. In the new timeline he performs Wonderwall, but this time it is an original as nobody knows Oasis. Now Ellie falls in love with him as she sees this great talent. Jack does not pick up on the interest as his view of the timeline never changed.

Of course, whenever this is a time travel/time change movie there are always things that don't really stand up to closer inspection.

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Interesting theory!

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There is no reason why the main characters wouldn't exist, since they had absolutely no connection with any of the Beatles.

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Everyone has a connection to everyone, especially as more time goes by for effects to ripple out. For anyone to exist, it requires that their parents have intercourse at the exact correct moment, with every motion being entirely the same down to the last millimeter and the last microsecond. Taking a major pop group off the airwaves makes a lot of change fairly quickly.

But I believe the butterfly effects would be strong even from much less change. If instead you just changed things so that one specific person who was a janitor in the 1960s in our reality instead worked at a gas station, I believe within five years of that change every baby on earth would be different. A lot of them would be born to the same parents and would therefore be like a sister or a brother to the person they replaced, but that’s still different and then the differences would only magnify over time.

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I agree that the Beatles failing to form would have wide-reaching effects, but I disagree that a janitor working instead at a filling station would have a profound global effect.

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I think you're vastly underrating the butterfly effect and how much any given person being born depends on their father not shifting by even a millimeter during sex or beginning the act a microsecond sooner or later.

I'm not saying the basic sweep of history and cultural trends wouldn't be broadly similar in most cases. But the actual people would be different.

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The Oasis Wonderwall bugged me after seeing this movie. Also Radiohead wouldn't exist or may exisit in a different fashion, stay as a rock group like their debut album ('Creep' style music), he has a massive poster for the Hail to the Thief behind his bedroom door.

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Good call.

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Why do you assume there would be no Radiohead?

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He probably just sang a different song, nothing Britpop.

Including mention of the Stones and Bowie was also strange, they both had recorded Beatles Songs.

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Many more musical and obscure things would not exist or be different without the Beatles in existence.

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Totally.

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In that world, I'd be more intrigued when I learned cigarettes don't exist. Is that because people never started smoking tobacco leaves or because tobacco itself doesn't grow? Either way, that change would have major implications on the course of world history.

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Good point! I grew up in North Carolina, by "Tobacco Road", so I totally see what you mean.

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