Based on the classic Ray Bradbury short story, A Sound Of
Thunder is a time travel story dealing with Time Safari, a company founded by
Charles Hatton (Ben Kingsley) that uses time travel to take paying customers
back to the pre-historic age for the once in a lifetime thrill of shooting a
dinosaur. The catch is that it’s the same dinosaur--an Allosaurus that was about
to die anyway--that is chosen as the intended target. When the time doorway
opens, the Time Safari team remain on a force field-created runway so they do
not disturb the environment, and they even wear special encased suits that are
complete with their own oxygen. The bullets they use to shoot the dinosaur are
made of ice, so that they melt and leave nothing behind. But of course, despite
all of their precautions, something goes horribly wrong, disrupting the whole
time/space thingy and our "heroes" find themselves living in a 21st century
Chicago that’s becoming overrun with deadly plant life and super-evolved
predators that are a cross between dinosaurs and primates.
Sounds
cool, right? If only it truly were. The original Ray Bradbury story was a brief
but effective tale with a shocker ending that was better suited to be either a
short film, or an episode of the Twilight Zone. Instead the filmmakers have
stretched it out into a feature movie, and in doing so, created one of the most
ludicrous films made in recent history. Bear in mind that present day Chicago is
steadily being wracked by time waves which throws the city further into a
post-apocalyptic wasteland, with the Big One still to come--a final time wave that
will wipe out the human race itself. Running the risk of having their
time travel tech erased, wouldn’t you think this crack team of time
travel experts would go back in time the very first chance they get? No, instead
they run around a rapidly degenerating Chicago in the present day in an attempt
to find their last clients, just so they can find out what actually happened, when
that very same answer will be provided for them via a travel back to the original
event.
Let’s not even try to decipher the scientific posturing that goes on in this
film about the how and why of time travel.
Instead let’s focus on the really god-awful special effects that this film is
saddled with. We’re denied even pretty eye candy to look at, thanks to inept CGI
that looks like something out of a cheapo video game. The characters are flat
and lifeless, and the script is so dense and stupid it’s hardly worth going over
any more of its faults. Suffice it to say A Sound Of Thunder does manage to
manipulate time in that the film run just over an hour and a half, and yet it
feels like it’s much longer. If you want to take a fun ride through time, then
try Timeline and Retroactive, which are far better time travel movies that have
far more imagination and fun than this waste of time.
--SF
Main Review Page | SF Reviews |Email Me |Trust me, you don't want to buy this one!