The sad fact is that for many film reviews, I’m often a little late to the party. Of course, thanks to the wonders of DVD, that party never really ends. Once upon a time, movies came and went. If you were lucky, it was re-released a few years later and you’d get a second shot at it. In our oh so modern world, however, the “re-release” happens whenever the DVD finally arrives at our doorstep.
Such is the case here, after a workmate suggested that 2005’s A Sound of Thunder was a good silly film, worth the time to watch, and loaned me her copy.
She lied.
A Sound of Thunder tries to be a throwback, a B-movie with aspirations for a higher grade. In this sense, it’s on par with one of my favorite guilty pleasure films, The Core. The Core is massively silly, but you always get the idea that the cast and crew knew it and were just having a good time. Such is not the case with A Sound of Thunder, wherein cast and crew just lumber along. It never becomes fun. The term “leaden” thuds to mind.
The film is based on the Ray Bradbury short story of the same name. Sometimes you can inflate a short and create a decent film. Total Recall, for example, is a Philip K. Dick short that was skillfully expanded into a great feature-length film. Total Recall works because the short has lots of possibilities for expansion; A Sound of Thunder does not.
The plot is simple: In the future, time travel is a reality and a company uses that technology to take hunters back in time for the hunt of a lifetime. The restriction is that you can’t touch the past in any way. The chosen prey is already fated to die at near the moment and place the hunters blast it down. The hunters wear protective suits, breath their own air supply, etc. They walk on a special path that hovers above the ground so even the grass is undisturbed.
Naturally, things go awry when one of the hunters panics and steps off the path. In doing so, he kills a butterfly. In the short, they discover this before returning to the present. The question they face is what changes in their future may have occurred as a result.
The short takes its title from the way in which Bradbury describes the way in which T-rex they are hunting roars, like “a sound of thunder.” It also comes into play at the short story's conclusion. In the film, the title is meaningless. They keep the title only as a tie-back to the short story, but little of the source material remains...pretty much just character names. After the opening, we’re told who the villain will be, with cue cards saying that humanity has created a most fantastic invention that can be used for good or evil, yet one man uses it “to make money.” Well how dare he, because making money is inherently very, very evil. Just ask any film producer or Marxist.
Our intrepid time-traveling hunters don’t discover that someone has crushed a bug until they’ve returned to the present and things start to change. Instead of a complete yet subtle shift in things due to a tiny change in the distant pass, changes happen in waves, while they watch. Why this is so is never discussed, just proclaimed. With each “time wave,” things change more and more. When the last wave hits, the last creature to have evolved (somehow determined to be us) will change. For inexplicable but plot-driven reasons, cities remain, admittedly now covered in weeds, and backup generators, those things of wonder, continue to work.
A moment’s thought would tell you to immediately jump back in time and see what the panicky hunters are about to do and stop them. But that would result in a very short, albeit logical, film. Instead, we’re subjected to a protracted and silly journey across town to find the panicky hunters and figure out what they did. In a race to fix things before that final wave turns us all into...whatever, our heroes opt to ignore the logical shortcut and go for a stroll in the park.
The film’s internal “logic” vanishes as you realize that our time-traveling hunters hunt the same dinosaur over and over. It’s never explained how, since they keep going back to the same time and place, they don’t run into other time-traveling hunters. We are just expected not to notice. But this discrepancy is rubbed in our face when going back to warn the hunters becomes our hero’s goal. Now you’re forced to wonder why he’ll only bump into the correct set of hunters and not any of the others, and why they weren’t bumbling into each other all along.
The entire cast is abused, from Oscar winner Ben Kingsley, to the steady and reliable Ed Burns, to the inexplicably hot Heike Makatsch. (What is it with German actresses lately? First I stumble upon Cosma Shiva Hagen in Speed Racer, and now Heike....)
Director Peter Hyams opted for a large-scale feel which resulted in his “vision” exceeding his budget. The film has some of the worst special effects you’ll ever see, the sort that gives CGI a bad name. You can hear him thinking, “This will look really cool,” only it never does.
I confess, Hyams’s involvement might skew my opinion. After the delightful Capricorn One, he had a shot at a prestige film, 2010; he and his ego blew it. Now he’s a hack. Amazingly, A Sound of Thunder is worse than his previous film foray into time travel, Timecop.
A Sound of Thunder is not even a guilty pleasure, it’s just crap. Thank God I didn’t buy this, so I can return it to its owner, who, at $5, was overcharged. Now I can sit back and watch a better film from my own library, something like Battlefield Earth....
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