A Sound of Thunder
Starring: Ed Burns, Catherine McCormack, Ben KingsleyDirector: Peter Hyams
Year of Release: 2005
This movie is a time-travel sci-fi flick based on a short story by Ray Bradbury. I’m a sucker for time-travel sci-fi. I can’t get enough of it. But there have been so many time travel stories it has gotten very cliche. And often the logic and science loosely involved in these stories barely holds together. Well, A Sound of Thunder pretty much tosses out all attempts at applying logic to time travel. Almost immediately you can start picking apart the plot holes and watch the film go veering off into the ridiculous. It’s a true exercise in “suspension of disbelief.”
The story centers around a company that offers time-travel safaris to super-rich people who want to go back in time and shoot a dinosaur. Supposedly they have lots of safety protocols to make sure they don’t alter the past, but of course that all gets jacked up and the present begins to transform as the past sends “time waves” forward that alter the world to conform to the new history that has been created by altering the past. Pretty standard stuff as far as time travel stories go.
This movie may have almost worked if it had been a modest made-for-TV movie playing on the sci-fi channel. But as a feature film, it’s just lacking in every possible way. You can almost see a better movie buried deep inside this one. If only it had scored a better cast, a better director, and about $50 million more in budget, it could have been on the level of an I, Robot. But it’s doomed to fail on so many levels as the ambition of the story outweighs the skills of the film makers.
The special effects in this film are pretty bad. I’ve seen better effects on episodes of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. It’s okay for television, but on the big screen it looks pretty ridiculous. Jurrasic Park came out 12 years before this movie, yet the “dinosaur” in this movie looks like something from 12 years before Jurrasic Park! And the so-called “street scenes” of what is supposed to be Chicago in 2055 look about as convincing as playing The Sims. There is even one scene where 2 actors are clearly walking in front of a green screen on a treadmill, is this movie from 1975 or 2005? Very cheesy looking.
The time travel stuff in the movie doesn’t hold up to even the smallest scrutiny. There are way too many glaring things wrong with what they are putting forward that it would take all night to write them all up. It gets beyond annoying eventually. I especially thought the whole “time wave” thing was just stupid and didn’t make any sense. And the whole thing where they basically string together a time machine out of spare parts was pretty silly too. And the list goes on and on.
The acting was pretty mediocre at best. Ben Kingsley was slumming it here and one wonders how desperate he is to work if he’ll just take anything they throw at him. Ed Burns doesn’t really act so much as deadpan his way through this like a bored store clerk at Best Buy. Everyone else probably wouldn’t even get hired as an extra on Battlestar Gallactica.
The director of this movie, Peter Hyams, coincidentally directed TimeCop, the 1994 time-travel brother of this movie. And honestly, say what you will about Jean Claude Van Damme but that was a much better movie. If you’re bored on a random Tuesday night and you stumble across this on USA network or FX, maybe give it a spin. Otherwise, you’re not missing anything.
