A Sound Of Thunder (2004) (1 Viewer)

I LOVE this story! Hope they don't f*ck it up!

I am looking forward to this also, hoping it's better than the disappointing Butterfly Effect.

However, one aspect of the film premise confuses me (which is entirely different than the short story). According to IMDB, when one of the time travellers accidently kills a butterfly a chain reaction is set off that erases humanity and they must prevent it. But if humanity is wiped out how would they be alive to travel back in time in the first place?

It could make a great movie if done correctly. Being a fan of the short story, I friend gave me a copy of the story done for TV. It isn't bad, but does not do justice to the story.

The trailer is out:

http://scifi.com/scifiwire/art-main..../23/12.10.film

Looks like a CGI-fest.

Looks like I shoulda hoped a little harder...this looks like a bad episode of "Walking with Dinosaurs"! How come after more than ten years "Jurassic Park" is STILL the only dinosaur flick to do it right? (AND realistically...)

I bet that the PS2 version has better graphics.

Man, 8% at Rotten.

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/sound_of_thunder/

At least in the DC area it wasn't screened for reviewers - never a good sign.

Neil

I haven't finished my review for HBS/EFC, but it will start thusly:

"A Sound of Thunder is a deeply stupid movie. It is the kind of stupid where an educated man holds a spherical object in his hand and calls it a "disc". It's also cheap-looking - I swear the computer model the special effects used for the allosaurus was Toy Story's Rex - but I might be able to forgive that, if not for the stupidity. The people who wrote the screenplay seemed to have learned everything they know about causality, biology, and physics from watching Star Trek (the bad years). It's the kind of movie where particle accelerators have chairs inside. It's the type of movie that forces anyone talking about it to make up words like "gorillasaur"."

Then, I plan to get mean.

I had caught a clip of it at IFilm which had Mirando Otto dramatically open the curtains and show an incoming time-wave or something. It was then that I knew I had to see this at the cheapest bargain price possible and laugh and laugh.

It's sad this is getting slammed so hard. I love these types of films but this is looking more and more like a giant dino turd.

I like these stories as well, but the film makers thought they could do a better job than Bradbury. Looks like a TV Movie of the week.

What's sad is the film looks on par with the TV Episode version of the story that aired on "Ray Bradbury Theatre" in 1989. http://home.wlv.ac.uk/~in5379/rbt/24...nd_thunder.htm

It seems like its a flop. The critics are hammering it. Bummer, it just means fewer of these Time Travel movies will be made. I'm going to see it anyway I'm a TT movie lover.

While I have no ill will towards those who participated in the making of this film... I can't wait to see it and laugh my ass off!

It is indeed quite bad, although I don't fault it as much as some of the reviews I just read.

The film is really rife with bad special effects, easily rivaling the type you'd see on a weekly Sci-Fi film show. This is distracting because the film is loaded with special effects shots in an attempt to show their futuristic world. Lots and lots of street scenes showing off near future automobiles, lots of creatures, moving vines, and time waves. It's hard to look past it often to see if there is a movie going on, but you can after a while.

The real problem is that it feels like a sci-fi movie written by someone who doesn't care about science. And it isn't so much the kind of generic hollywood sci-fi, which contains a kernel of realism slathered with chocolate excess. It's just complete logical anarchy. It's all the worse that it is so earnest and serious that it feels all the more ridiculous. They landed B+ actors too, which is a coup considering what they were being attracted to. I suspect they were given the Bradbury short story and not the script.

The film is close to a filming of the book until the point where something in the past changes. From there, it not only completely disregards the book's concept of time continuity, but misinterprets it at nearly every step to create silly scenarios whenever they can.

The effect of a single butterfly in the book was enough to modify human culture in slight but significant ways. Not so much to make it so a time traveling company would no longer exist, but to swing government and spelling off kilter. In the movie, a single butterfly is able to essentially allow the dinosaurs to survive a catastrophic meteor which eradicated them in the first place. It also apparently turned some lizards into mammals in some kind of gorrilizard.

They also, in some bizarre attempt to create an action scene, decided that a volcano should erupt right after their chosen kill dies. How did this cruicial butterfly survive the massive devastation of the volcano? And they seem, to my eyes, to have killed the same Allosaurus several times. How exactly could they have returned to the same place to kill the same animal again? They've already, in their timeline, gone back and killed it.

In what was the clearest example of how wrong headedly they were taking time travel, they bend over backwards to somehow justify alternate time creatures in overgrown human environments. How would they have made fantastic cities if they were no longer the dominant species? Just let the universe catch up to you, it can only fix paradoxes of a certain number of creatures per time wave, silly.

There was never really a way to turn the original story into a monster movie, which the filmmakers desperately wanted to do. They found their way, but all it did was cripple any bit of sci fi left in it. All you're left with are uninvolving action sequences with poor special effects and badly set up situations.

Box Office Mojo says they production budget was $80million. In a joke I assume is repeated in many reviews, they need to travel back in time and step on whoever decided to spend that much on this.

I saw this movie over the weekend and thought it was really bad. The special effects looked like they were done 20 years ago. The creatures looked like toys from Toy Story. This was a B movie all the way.