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Edward Burns,
Edward Burns,
Catherine McCormack,
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Peter Hyams,
Peter Hyams
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: Warner Home Video
: Science Fiction
: 110 min.
: English
: English, Spanish, French
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A seemingly insignificant act may cause the fabric of history to unravel in this sci-fi adventure. Charles Hatton (Ben Kingsley) owns and operates a successful firm known as Time Safari. Thanks to time travel technology developed by Hatton's employee Sonia Rand (Catherine McCormack), Time Safari allows big game hunters to journey back to prehistoric days and shoot living, breathing dinosaurs. Rand picks out the dinosaur in question, who is soon to die, and creates a floating walkway for the hunters, so the impact of their presence will not be felt by the land around them. But on one expedition, things go horribly wrong when a nervous hunter steps off the walkway and crushes a butterfly, a tiny act that proves to have massive consequences over the course of several million years. As the earth's climate and animal life begin to mutate due to this shift in natural history, Time Safari's leading hunting guide, Travis Ryer (Edward Burns), works beside Rand in a desperate attempt to halt the "ripples of time" before modern civilization completely collapses. A Sound of Thunder was based on a classic short story by pioneering science fiction author Ray Bradbury. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
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| Dumb Fun
by talltale
April 1, 2006 - 4:36 PM PST
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1 out of 1 members found this review helpful
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A finalist in the worst-movie-title of the year award, A SOUND OF THUNDER says absolutely nothing about the content or nature of the film itself. Perhaps the moviemakers thought that using this name would lock in the sci-fi/fantasy audience reminded of the Ray Bradbury short story on which it's based. (as though today's mass moviegoers read?). Whatever, the end result was one of the year's biggest disasters in terms of money spent to money earned, as well as being one of the most critically drubbed films of the year.
Director Peter Hyams is unusual in that he often acts as his own director of photography, which he does again here. His movies usually look good, too, even if they are among the very dumb of mind. With clinker after clinker among his more than 20 films (a few done for TV), there are three that still prove quite entertaining and exciting--"The Relic," "Sudden Death" and "Time Cop"--so, clearly, this guy can perform when the script allows.
Nowhere near the level of his three good ones, "The Sound of Thunder" is still more dumb fun than the reviews let on. The special effects are clearly fake (especially when the characters take their walks thru the city: Whew, bad!) but many of them are so odd and entertaining (the genetically-altered baboons, bats and other creatures) that you may be carried along. Actually, Ben Kinglsley's hair is perhaps the best special effect of them all. Don't look for much intelligent "science" here, of course, although the basic premise has possibilities that the filmmakers probably wasted. All in all, this is an OK time-waster. |
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GreenCine Member Rating
(Average 2.33)
3 Votes
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