A Sound of Thunder (2005) Reviews

• Best bad movie of the year!

  mooshki2005-09-03

  I live for movies like this. Saw it in a theater with about 12 other people. 3 people left about 20 minutes in. I'm not sure if they left because the movie was so bad or because they couldn't hear the dialogue over the laughter of the rest of us. Mediocre special effects don't excite me. Abysmally bad special effects are wonderful. I disagree with the previous commenter -- I don't think the actors were walking on a treadmill in front of the green screen, I think they were just standing in place and shifting their weight from one foot to the other. Sir Ben Kingsley is clearly aware of the "quality" of this film and embraces the ridiculousness, having a great time reading his absurd lines. The plot, the dialogue, the special effects, the creatures, the actor's accents -- each piece of this movie is worse than the last. There were at least three scenes that made me laugh so hard I cried. I love dumpster-diving through bad movies in search of treasure. The recent crop of bad movies have been just plain boring. This one is the diamond that makes it all worthwhile.

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• No budget for FX or Advertising...

  kurosawa2005-09-03

  I have lived in the Los Angeles area for about a year now. When I can, I enjoy seeing free screenings of movies. As I understand it, these test screenings are done by marketing-research companies at the behest of the movie studios. You watch a movie for free and then you fill out a form explaining what you liked and didn't like about the movie. The company then selects a smaller group of viewers for a Q & A focus group. So I saw a free screening of A SOUND OF THUNDER about six months ago. We were told that the special effects were just "mock-ups" and therefore to not judge those effects too harshly. And we were promised that for the actual release the special effects would look spectacular. I just watched A SOUND OF THUNDER on its opening Friday and the special effects were EXACTLY the same. They used the mock-ups, the "pretend special effects," for the release. Which leaves me to believe that the test screenings got such bad feedback that the studio decided to cut its losses. They didn't advertise this film very much and they didn't spend any REAL money on the special effects. One thing they may have changed was some of the editing. The pace felt a little better than the original free screening. I mean the movie has a lot of problems but it seemed like some small things were cut or at least cut differently. I'm hoping that the DVD will have a commentary track so we can hear the behind-the-scenes story of what really happened. But I doubt the studio will put any bells and whistles on the DVD release. I agree with everyone else. This is a bad movie (with the exception of Ben Kingsley's interesting character work). But it was made worse by the studio's lack of commitment and backing.

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• Prepare to thunder towards the exit

  TheMovieMark2005-09-01

  What exactly is the sound of thunder? If this movie is any indication then it's the sound of moviegoers thundering towards the exit, demanding their money back. Yes, the movie is that bad. "Hey Johnny, how bad is it?" This movie is so bad that Ray Bradbury wishes he could invent a time machine so that he could go back in time and NOT write the short story, thus preventing this movie from ever being made. "Whoa, that bad?" Worse. In fact, this movie is so bad that Ray Bradbury might kill himself just so he can roll over in his grave. I know you think I'm trying to be cute, but I'm being serious. This was one of the strangest movie experiences I've had in quite a while. The problem is that I went into the movie expecting to enjoy it. I thought it had the chance to be pretty good. So at the very start I was trying to make excuses for what was unraveling on screen. The first thing to induce unintentional laughter was the fact that Ben Kingsley (the owner of the time traveling safari who's only interested in how much money he can make) looks like Bob Barker. Nice poofy white wig, Ben. Oh well, no big deal, I can laugh that off. Then we're introduced to the first CGI dinosaur of the movie. "Hmm, that sure looks really fake," I thought. "Oh, I know! It's supposed to be fake. They're tricking the hunters into thinking the dinosaur is real, but it's mechanical or something." Nope. Imagine my sheer horror when I came to the realization that the dinosaur was supposed to be real. Wow. At this point I started to get nervous. Then came the incredibly bad green screens. Folks, these are some of the worst green screens I've ever seen. My words cannot do justice to how fake they looked. Some might even say they looked faker than those things Pamela Anderson tries to pass off as breasts. When you can tell that the actors are walking on a treadmill then you have serious issues that are long past addressing. I was absolutely shocked at what I was witnessing. Honestly, I started to get confused and thought, "What in the world is going on? This movie cost $80 million to make, there's no way it can look this bad." Where there's a will, there's a way, and somebody must've had a strong will to make this as cheesy and as goofy as they could because I cannot come up with any other explanation. I actually like the concept of the movie - the butterfly effect - the theory that something as small as a butterfly flapping its wings can produce long-term effects on a dynamical system. However, this movie presents the theory in the most outlandish, most unbelievable way imaginable. Sorry, but I just didn't buy it. One of the scientists in the movie argues that if you kill a bee, then that bee can't pollinate a flower, and an animal will not be able to eat that flower, thus that animal will die and can cause damaging long-term effects. Um, if "Flower A" never blossoms then an animal that's hungry will just go find "Flower B" and eat that. I don't think the animal will immediately die AND CAUSE HUMANS TO TURN INTO ALIEN-LIKE CREATURES!!! Come on. So the movie decides to take the "butterfly effect" to the most extreme depths that it possibly can - fine, whatever. What *really* bothered me is it doesn't care to explain why killing the butterfly resulted in the world being taken over by horribly rendered CGI creatures. It would have at least been nice to have an explanation as to why and how such drastic changes took place because of one simple butterfly. The butterfly would've been killed in a volcano that erupts right before they head back to the time machine anyway, so how do you explain that? Well, if your name is A Sound of Thunder then you don't. You just say, "Here's the premise, now we're just going to become a monster movie and have the good guys be chased by bat monsters in the dark." Well, I'd be interested in hearing what's said when this movie becomes one of the biggest (if not THE biggest) flops of the year. At about the halfway point I realized that there was no need to continue to rationalize why the movie appeared to be so bad. I accepted the fact that in this case appearances were not deceiving and this was just a really horrible movie. If you can accept that from the start then there is plenty of unintentional laughter to be had. Once our heroes started being chased by weird ape/bat/dinosaur hybrids, I just kicked back, laughed, and shook my head at the fact that the CGI is as bad (if not worse) than what you see in Sci-Fi Original movies starring Lorenzo Lamas and Michael Paré. I wish I were exaggerating. I honestly don't know how this movie was allowed to achieve such mediocrity. You know when one of the characters starts off with an American accent, then begins to fluctuate between American and British accents, and then eventually settles into her native British accent that everybody involved has obviously thrown in the towel and said, "Screw it, let's just get this over with." You would think that in the year 2005 a movie with an $80 million budget wouldn't look more like a movie that was made on an $8 million budget. I'm sorry, but CGI this awkward on this size of a budget is just inexcusable. Way to go Hollywood. We can only hope a few jobs are lost over this disaster.

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• A Day Late and a Dollar Short

  RandomTask-AP2005-08-31

  The possibilities of time travel make for complex science fiction. As one of Sci-Fi's great writers, Ray Bradbury saw the potential for making a point and used it to a frightening end. As a lame-duck director, Peter Hyams saw the opportunity to make one more project and maybe give his career some much-needed resuscitation. The misaligned dichotomy simply results in a mess. In the mid-21st Century, Travis Ryer (Ed Burns) leads prehistoric hunting safaris, from which the Time Safari (groan) company earns its bread and butter. Having seized the time machine built by Sonia Rand (Catherine McCormack), Charles Hatton (Ben Kingsley) built up his company to overcharge the indulgent rich who seek to have a new experience. On a trek with a pair of thrill seeking buddies, a couple of things go wrong, and although everyone survives, the mistake causes changes in time and evolution. It is at this point where the noticeable deviation from Bradbury's story occurs. In the original tale, there was no going back to fix the problem, and the time travelers were left to face the horror of a world which had been subtly altered to permit ignorance, bigotry and fascism to be the dominant qualities of mankind. In the hands of these screenwriters, the mistake simply becomes a vehicle to generate a variety of creepy-crawly monsters that stalk the people of the story as they try to literally race against time and fix the mistake. The script drags all the clichés out and leaves the actors to cover them. There is the greedy CEO, the disillusioned scientist, the noble hero, loyal sidekick and even a corrupt official. The scientist expresses her outrage at the corporate abuse of her invention to the hero who is a better man than she expected. All the actors do everything they can to rail against the pitfalls they are presented with. Ed Burns conveys an easy hero's swagger and knows that he'll get more mileage out of underplaying than by shouting. Catherine McCormack does a highly competent job of spouting endless reams of technobabble while managing to sound like she actually knows what she is talking about, but she and Burns simply have no romantic chemistry. How Academy Award Winner Ben Kingsley ended up as part of the production is anyone's guess, but the quirks that he piles into the carnival-mouthed "Charles Hatton" are the single best bit of entertainment. Hyams fumbles the details to the point of insulting the audience. People make all sorts of irrational decisions just to forward the plot or introduce a set piece. When someone makes a mistake, they usually recheck their work. Here the tech drops a piece of equipment and visibly damages it. He re-stacks it and ignores it. Even the hero, at one point, declares that the party must go down into the dark, abandoned, unstable and partly flooded subway tunnels because "it's the only way". Presumably, it's better to have the odds stacked against you where you might run into bloodthirsty creatures instead of staying on stable ground where you might run into bloodthirsty creatures. Although there isn't any sort of racial subtext, the movie goes so far as to sacrifice the only major African-American character as a distraction to hungry monsters so the white people can run for their lives. It doesn't seem to be making any sort of real-world point, and the editor does struggle against this obviously outdated plot moment. However, it ultimately plays out badly and without dignity. There is also no reason (other than it looks cool) to believe that changes in time would occur in visible waves of force that knock people and cars around, but not buildings or animals. One can imagine that this might have been at least fun in the hands of a militantly perfectionist filmmaker like Jim Cameron who beats even clichéd celluloid moments until they resound with the exact shape and feel he demands. In spite of making several films throughout the 90's and recent years, Hyams peaked with "2010: The Year We Make Contact" in 1984 - while standing on Stanley Kubrick's cinematic shoulders. Even taking the troubled production history of "A Sound of Thunder" into account, Hyams butchers the possibilities here. The audience is denied the simple delight of watching special effects during a sci-fi adventure because of the shoddy craftsmanship and a lack of money. Several virtual sets were created to make a more complete city of the future, but they often look unrendered and more like a very good artist's drawing. However this is not a substitute for a good set, and it is painfully clear when actors are standing in front of a green screen. This was originally slated for a 2003 release, which would have put it ahead of the virtual productions of "Sky Captain" and "Sin City". Had things not been derailed by the original production company's bankruptcy (see the "Thunder" trivia section on IMDb.com), then maybe this would have been noteworthy in its attempt to push special effects boundaries. Unfortunately for the filmmakers, there were many times when the audience at this screening burst into laughter at some of the sights. The one thing that Hyams' FX team does get right is the gang of computer-generated creatures that should have been the design for the villain in his 1997 movie, "The Relic". As cool as the things look, it is 8 years and 3 movies past due. Failures in effects and leaps of logic can be forgiven, but only up to a point. This is not a misfire form an otherwise successful director. This is a poor turn by a weak hand who refuses to respect his characters or the audience who has come to be entertained. Only the actors make the weak production bearable. "A Sound of Thunder" got a second chance to pull things together, but look into your own future and avoid watching this mistake. 2 out of 10

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• Why are people so bitter?

  cheerio-12005-09-06

  I don't understand why people hate this movie so much. I haven't seen such scathing reviews since Gigli. It sure seems like people (both the pros on rottentomatos and the amateurs here) are just trying to outdo each other in how nasty they can be. Let me hit the major objections: The time waves. Oh boy, people hated the time waves. Too complicated and it was different than the previous movies they'd seen, they said. I would point out that the time-wave theory most recently appeared in the 2005 Doctor Who series, and it made sense on its own terms. The movie took care to explain why the time waves could not be passed through, and why the alternate travel at the end eliminated them. What else could you ask for? Would people prefer the lousy, nonsensical "fade-away" theory of Back to the Future? Or the Terminator style of just ignoring the paradox altogether? I for one like to see new sci-fi ideas when I watch sci-fi movies. The griping about the central plot innovation reminds of how people hated the original Ring movie for the idea of the enchanted videotape. The SFX. Granted, they weren't at the level of Lord of the Rings, but the movie did not cost as much as Lord of the Rings. For a movie that had so little money left over for post after the Czech floods destroyed the sets during shooting, it's rather unfair to point out that there were only a handful of vehicle models and one of the street textures came from 3D Studio Max. The effects on the whole were far better than most of what we saw in the 1990s, and they were considered adequate then. To say the SFX looked like cardboard cut-outs? Give me a break. That kind of frothing at the mouth is not helpful in a review. Moreover, the SFX always advance the plot, which is something that can't be said for the Star Wars podrace or the Harry Potter Quidditch (also known as the George Lucas et al. Bathroom Break). The acting. One of the previous comments glowingly referred to Ben Kingsley's work in Sexy Beast. Now that movie had the worst camera-work since Blair Witch and the most turgid, obvious plot, and the tardiest pacing of any movie I saw that year. If that person likes movies like Sexy Beast (I believe the polite word for that kind of movie is "dialogue-driven"), then it's their own damn fault for going to see a monster sci-fi movie. I believe the acting could be fairly described as "competent" -- easily better than the Star Wars movies, for example. Nobody is going to win an Oscar, but on the other hand it doesn't star Russell Crowe. The script. I agree it could have used some editing, but at no point do the characters act like complete idiots. I would have liked to have seen an explanation of why the expeditions never ran into each other until the end, and why the main character just disappears at the end. But most, if not all, of the minor plot holes could have been resolved with better dialogue. For instance, instead of wasting time saying roughly "It will hurt, when you're pulled twice," the female scientist could have said "when this machine shuts down, this version of you will die." When they're going into the subway, the main character could have said "there are monsters up here and we would die; there may not be monsters down there" instead of whatever frivolous comment he made. In other movies (much of the Matrix 2 and 3, or the ending of AI), the plots simply made no sense on a first watching. It is better, in my opinion, to have a script that could use a little editing instead of one that completely bamboozles the moviegoer. Also, the repetitiveness of the movie (such as the ape-lizards which seemed to be everywhere) seemed to be because of SFX short-budgeting -- they had a limited creature budget. As I said above I think it's a little unfair to criticize the movie for being low-budget, when on the whole it looks pretty good. I was glad to see a B-style sci-fi movie, since its been months since the 2005 Doctor Who series finished. It had big sets, famous second-tier actors, and lots of SFX. The plot was miles better than the last four or five Star Trek movies, to say nothing of Alien v. Predator, and it's a shame that it will do so much more poorly just because it doesn't have a "franchise" attached to it.

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