A SOUND OF THUNDER (2005)
Directed by: Peter Hyams
Genre: Sci-Fi
Country: USA
THE MOVIE
As I’ve stated before, I love a good time travel movie. Unfortunately, A Sound of Thunder is not that movie. It is based on the classic Ray Bradbury piece of the same name which is a milestone in time travel fiction and is famous for its idea that if you kill a butterfly in the Cretaceous the world will be totally different when you get back because of an exponential chain of cause and effect events. It was even parodied in a "Treehouse of Horror" episode of the The Simpsons.
What's that? Ripples in space/time? Let's shoot them!
I haven’t read the story myself but I can only assume that the movie is heavily dumbed down from its source material because A Sound of Thunder is a silly bimbo of a movie, filled with laughable science and some awful special effects. Edward Burns plays Travis Ryer, a Chicago scientist in the near future. Now I would buy Burns as a cop, a firefighter, even a guy who sells hotdogs at Yankee Stadium but not a biophysicist. Oh well, if Bruce Willis and J-Lo can play psychiatrists, I guess anything goes. Ben Kingsley is also on board a scheming executive showing that doing just one bad science fiction movie is not enough for him.
Ryer works for Time Safari a company that offers carefully controlled hunting safaris in the past (apparently only to the exact same point in the past). Rich douchebags are whisked away to take some potshots at a plastic-looking Allosaurus before it gets trapped in a swamp. The idea being that because the creature was about to die anyway there would be no changes made to the timeline. Of course, if you carry the movie's premise to its logical extent, any disruption to the past would result in a different future, even a microscopic one.
When someone accidentally steps on a butterfly we begin to see successive changes in the present, “Like ripples in a pond,” one of the movie’s scientists explains. Later ripples introduce us to weird creatures like a giant bat and the movie’s star monsters…the baboonasaurus.
THE MONSTERS/EFFECTS
He's too ridiculous to even have his own movie on the SyFy Channel.
Most of the effects are pretty bad, such as the very CGI looking Allosaurus and lots of bad composite shots throughout. The baboonasaurs are done well and are strangely compelling if only because they are so absurd. Maybe its just crazy enough looking to be a plausible animal.
SEQUELS
This movie was a huge flop and no sequels are planned.
MOST MEMORABLE SEQUENCE
Did I mention that this movie features a Baboonasaur?
DVD AVAILABILITY
Widely available.
SEE ALSO
The Relic also features some Chitown monster action by the same director.
Evolution also has as its theme evolution gone awry resulting in improbable creatures.
TRAILER
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