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Directed By
Peter Hyams
Written By:
Thomas Dean Donnelly, Joshua Oppenheimer, Greg Poirier
Cast:
Edward Burns, Ben Kingsley, Catherine McCormack, Armin Rohde, Heike Makatsch, Jemima Rooper, David Oyelowo, August Zirner, William Armstrong, Corey Johnson, John Comer, Alvin Van Der Kuech, Andrew Blanchard, Nikita Lespinasse, Scott Bellefeville, Sai-Kit Yung, Ho Hon Chou, Anezka Novak, John Hyams, Martin Svetlik, Kurt Van Der Basch, Vladimir Kulhavy, Jiri Klenot, Wilfried Hochholdinger, Antonin Hausknecht
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A Sound of Thunder (2005)
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Movie Review by Javi
February 19th, 2007
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We don't need roads...just a small walkway
Last year I saw a tiny little bit of this movie and it looked interesting. Now I've seen the whole thing. It was just the next movie in my collection that needed watching, nothing more. I was surprised when I realized this was the same movie I was glimpsed last summer. I was even more surprised by how bad it was.
A guess a quick synopsis of the plot is in order. It is the future and someone figured out how to time travel. Someone else bought the rights to the technology and is using it to set up very expensive "hunting" trips to the late Jurassic period (no matter what era the film claims to have gone to) to "hunt" an allosaurus. This being time travel, something goes wrong and hilarity, I mean, tragedy ensues. Our intrepid heroes have to work to set the timeline right and get everything back to normal while ensuring that this never happens again. That's it in a nutshell.
They tried. So very hard. Which only makes the ordeal sadder. I've seen other reviews comparing this to "the made-for-TV garbage regularly broadcast by the SciFi channel." That's not fair to the Sci-Fi channel productions. Honestly. Sci-Fi is purposefully trying to revive those campy B-Movies of old with giant killer ants and radioactive whoopy cushions. This movie was trying to be serious and it spent serious amounts of money (80 million) to do so.
So what went wrong? Everything. The story was see-through thin. Ray Bradbury's original short story may have been brilliant for it's time but with so many well-made time-travel movies, it needed more to be a full length feature film. The writer didn't seem to have it in him. The characters are similarly flat and uninspiring. I cared about how the creatures in the film might have evolved than the humans in it. Production, given the budget, was atrocious. Seriously, I've seen better effects on the Sci-Fi channel with an incredibly smaller budget. As for direction and editing? If this movie was more predictable it would have foreseen its impending failure and the film it was shot on would have eaten itself.
One more note on the writing. This is the first time I've seen this kind of "time-wave ripple effect" used anywhere. I'm not a physicist but it would seem to be that if you do something stupid and change the future while you are in the past, those changes wouldn't start small and escalate over a period of time. Shouldn't everything be changed when you get back to the future from your blunder-ladden trip? It could just be me but this seemed wrong and it honestly bothered me more than anything else.
Unless someone gives a copy I wouldn't really waste the time on this movie. Unless you're the demographic that Sci-Fi is looking for with their B-movie revival. If you are, then this movie is right up your alley.
Entertainment - 1/2: I did watch it all the way through. That has to count for something I guess. Plus...you can't do zero stars on matchflick's rating system.
Storytelling - 0 Stars
Characters and Dialogue - 0 Stars:
Production - 0 Stars
Direction and Editing - 0 Stars
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