A Sound of Thunder - 2005
December 18, 2007 - 2:07 am - Posted by Administrator
A Sound of Thunder is a classic Ray Bradbury story, a tale of time travel and the dangers of corporate greed. Although the film came out in 2005, many movie fans are unaware of it. It made few waves at the box office, and when I asked my sci-fi friend Rat if he’d seen it, he said he hadn’t. I mean, that’s almost scientific. This movie is underground.
Actually, A Sound of Thunder is a Peter Hyams movie, and although I’m a big fan of some of his films [Outland - 1981, The Relic - 1997], this one is not his best.
Edward Burns stars as Travis Ryer, a scientist working for Charles Hatton (Ben Kingsley), the CEO of “Time Safari”. Together, they take big-dollar clients on safaris to hunt dinosaurs, all the while being careful to “stay on the path”–a path which they must not step off lest they alter the past, and possibly the present. When something goes wrong, a client accidentally alters the past, and soon time waves are rippling through the present as the world changes in terrifying and unexpected ways. And this is where the movie starts to dissolve into a mess.
A Sound of Thunder tries too hard to be all things to all people, which comes as no surprise considering the screenplay was written by three people. It’s a science fiction time travel film. It’s a dinosaur movie. It’s a monster movie. And the hardest thing to take… it’s a CGI-heavy vision of the year 2055, and in places, the computer effects are almost too good. There are several scenes early in the movie where characters are having discussion outside on the sidewalk, and the computer-generated traffic going by in the background is so distracting that I couldn’t pay attention to the dialogue. The lighting is too good, the cars are too clean, and the traffic noise is too quiet. Plus there are little continuity errors that bugged me as I watched. For instance, to travel through time, the travelers strap themselves into some kind of sled and get shot into a time tunnel, but when they come out the other end, they are inexplicably on foot.
I frequently hear complaints from critics when movies move too slow and trudge on for three hours… this is one of the rare flicks I think they could have taken more time on. It clocks in at 105 minutes, and another twenty minutes could have produced more character definition and a smoother transition between some of the action sequences which come later in the film and seem almost forced into a pre-determined pace.
I should say, I’ve watched this movie twice now, so despite the negative things I’ve said about it, I’ll give it four stars because it was good enough to watch twice.
*** Four Stars
Posted in 2005, Four Star Rating, The Future, Time Travel | No Comments »
