A Sound Of Thunder

A Sound of Thunder (2005)

Runtime: 101 minutes

Directed by: Peter Hyams

Starring: Edward Burns, Catherine McCormack, Ben Kingsley, Jemima Rooper, David Oyelowo

From: Franchise Pictures

I have actually seen this terrible movie before, a long while ago. I explain why in my Letterboxd review below why I did so on Friday night:

Due to all the chaos that happened on Friday, I figured that evening I shouldn't watch anything serious and instead my viewing should be of something that I know will provide laughs, as I had seen it before. Of course with this film it's unintentional humor but it still did the job. Although, the movie is still agonizing to watch so maybe I should have seen a traditional comedy instead.

This is based on the short story by Ray Bradbury; a free version of it can easily be found via a Google search. It's an entertaining story and all, but due to its length it had to be greatly expanded upon for a feature length film and somehow this lunacy is what we got. It shows that stepping on just one butterfly 65 million years ago can drastically change things... I am not sure how it works considering that the area immediately gets wiped out by a volcano but what do I know? The tale is set in the future of 2055 and time travel allows for people to hunt dinosaurs in an area right before it would have died anyhow. Things go wrong, a butterfly (actually a giant moth; yes, they couldn't get that right) gets stepped on, and the concept of “time waves” are brought in; I am sure that concept is poppycock... there's more glaring scientific problems than that with this story, believe me.

The story has plenty of unintentional humor. The biggest force that this group of asstagonists (sad to say, the people we're supposed to root for are all unlikable A-holes, who act incredibly rude for no real good reason; the villain-played by Ben Kingsley wearing a goofy white wig that makes him look like Malcolm McDowell-comes off as more enjoyable because he's such a sleazy SOB) have to face is monkey-dinosaurs! Then, there's such things as the dinosaur being hunted not having lived in that time period by “only” 80 million years, all the time travel logic problems (some of which were in the short story but they didn't even try to fix those), the hilariously wrong statement that “humans were the last to evolve” or the mistaken belief that no organism is still evolving today, not understanding what the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is, etc. It's incredible.

The most incredible thing, though, is the CGI. You can't even really blame the filmmakers. It's unfortunate for them that their production company (Franchise Pictures) went bankrupt during filming so their budget got slashed by more than half and thus they had to use computer graphics that are even worse than what you see in SyFy Channel original movies. I mean, they look so terrible and that's an issue when the movie is full of CGI. At least it brought me much mirth and merriment.

Yet, I only recommend this movie to the masochists despite all the ha ha moments, as like I said the characters are so loathsome. What a mess this movie is; because of the bankruptcy this took a few years to come off, and maybe it should have stayed on the shelf. He wasn't the first choice for director but this has to be Peter Hyams' worst movie, and he's done things like End of Days and that terrible wire-fu version of the Three Musketeers.