A Sound of Thunder

In all fairness to director Peter Hyams, author Ray Bradbury and the various men credited with adapting Bradbury's short story into the new film A Sound of Thunder, something clearly went wrong during the film's production. IMDB says that the production company went bankrupt prior to the film's post-production, and that's certainly believable from the finished result, which looks like a hastily thrown-together concoction of science-fiction cliches designed to serve as just enough contractually-obligated finished product to keep everyone from getting sued.

I'm not saying that the script would ever have been a masterpiece, even if directed by James Cameron with a $200 million budget and a 2-year shooting schedule. But it would have helped some. As it is, this is the summer action blockbuster as middle school play, a collection of some of the clunkiest acting, stupidest misinterpretations of time travel and worst CG effects I personally have ever seen. Seriously. The computer-generated creatures and environments in A Sound of Thunder look like sub-Sci Fi Channel work. I'm not sure if the production was merely underfunded, or if they completely ran out of funds halfway through and just released to theaters, as is.

With a bigger budget, it would still be a dumb time travel movie. But we'd be spared abominations like this lizard-monkey-thing.



Bradbury's concept for the original short story is a solid one, albeit a hard one to adapt dramatically. In the future, once humans have mastered time travel, a company takes hunters back in time to the Late Cretaceous period to shoot at dinosaurs. But there's a catch - the travelers must leave everything exactly as it was, unchanged, to avoid messing up the chain of events that leads to our present-day. If one little thing changes - say, an insect dies that was meant to infect several dinosaurs with a virus - the entire ecosystem might be altered, which would fuck up the future we've all come to know and love.

It's kind of a head-scratcher, which is great for literary science-fiction and kind of weird for sci-fi movies. I mean...if one were to be logical...a slight change in the past would mess up the future instantaneously. When the time traveler returned to the "present," it would be different for him but normal for everyone else. And in all likelihood, you could never "set things right" again without imbalancing space-time in myriad other ways.

Like I said, not very cinematic. The makers of A Sound of Thunder, regrettably, try to cheat around this conundrum in the dumbest way possible. Instead of having the future change immediately, all at once, when there's been a slight alteration in the past, alterations in the past ecosystem now cause "time waves." Literally, "tidal waves" that look like incredibly bad computer-generated animation. Incredibly bad. It's supposed to look like a large, powerful, kinetic force bearing down on the City of the Future, throwing everything into disarray. Instead, it looks like clear Jell-O being dumped on top of a poorly-built model of Chicago.

The wave brings with it "evolutionary changes" - that is, the ripple effect of all the things from the past that have now been altered. In terms of the film itself, that signals a shift from a bad Twilight Zone riff and into a bad Outer Limits riff, from wacky science-fiction to low-budget monster movie. Basically, all kinds of new, freaky animals are created and start chasing around the human scientists (Ed Burns and Catherine McCormack). And Ben Kingsley's there, wearing a ridiculous wig, as the greedy CEO who started the dinosaur hunting company.

Did you just picture Ben Kingsley in a silly wig just now, when you read that last sentence? I guarantee the real wig is sillier. Check it out.



Lookin' good.

His character represents a pretty rare occurance in the movies - a villain with absolutely nothing to do. He hangs out, acts generally villainous, but the real enemy here is time itself. So he's just kind of ineffectually evil. Props to Mr. Kingsley for even trying a little bit to actually make this work.

I could go on all day about this film's overall level of schlock. It's pretty much without a doubt the most awesomely bad forgotten gem of 2005. In 20 years, no one will speak affectionately of Crash, the masses will have long since forgotten about the moderate charms of Capote or Cinderella Man. But college kids around the country will delight in getting stoned at 3 a.m. and watching A Sound of Thunder on their eye implants, or whatever the hell they're going to use to illegally download and watch old movies. This, I guarantee.