A Sound of Thunder

[Zarcath]

Haven't seen any trailers for this but saw it listed at the theatres. I remember someone mentioning this movie in the War of the Worlds thread.

Set in a near future where time travel is possible, this is the story of a travel agency, Time Safari Inc. (owned and managed by Kingsley's character), that arranges hunting trips for wealthy customers back in time to hunt dinosaurs. Each trip is carefully planned, with a scout identifying dinosaurs about to die, and then sending the clients back just seconds before, so the course of time is not altered by the kill. However, in this case, a nervous hunter steps off the trail, and steps on a butterfly. The historical repercussions of the death of a single butterfly, compounded by millions of years of effects, leaves the hunters to return to a future that is not quite the one they came from... Now, Travis Ryer (Burns), the lead dinosaur hunter, must team up with Sonia Rand (McCormack), the inventor of the time machine technology to stop the "time waves" that are rippling up from this event, threatening to erase humanity from existance.

Has anyone seen it yet?

[Vorph]

$80M budget movies don't get extremely limited releases unless something is very, very wrong with them. I'll go out on a limb here and say the studio decided to cut its losses. The 8% rating on RT seems to agree with that thought too.

Much as I like Edward Burns and Ben Kingsley, I think I'll be passing on this one.

[Ronne]

The trailers make no sense to me. Okay, time travel, gotcha, but they messed something up at some point, and now dinosaurs rule the earth ?

[dak]

This is the story...

http://www.is.wayne.edu/mnissani/WWI/thunder.htm


It's one of those Sci-Fi tales like War of the Worlds that simply loses its impact over time.

When Ray Bradbury first wrote the story the idea of a change in the past altering the future was really clever. Now it is just run of the mill "meh" plot material.

As for the movie it looks like it is made for TV.

[Faille]

watched it this afternoon. Its not a terrible movie, but its hard to see where they spent $80m. They have far too much of the blue screen effect in common scene which I think is becoming far to prevelant in hollywood these days. There's a reason its the prefered method for fan films to get their projects off the ground.

Plotwise you can probably all guess what it involves, and serves as a decent enough way to go from one acion sequence to another. In this respect its not too dissimilar to the Island in that they start off with an ok sci fi premise but then switch to action movie.

I definately wouldn't recommend seeing it at the cinema, but would make an ok dvd rental if you couldn't find anything you really want to see.

4/10

[Arbitrary]

The short story was what, 6 pages or something? Been a while since I read it.

Time traveling big game hunters go back in time to hunt dinosaurs. Want to kill a T-Rex? K, we find one just about to die normally and kill it right before it does. In the story they kill a T-Rex and a lightning strikes a tree that falls on the now made corpse T-Rex. Some guy squashes a butterfly and poof! When they return the politicians in the next election have switched places in their ideology. The peace guy is all war war war.

That's it, that's the whole story. They spent 80 million how?

[Faille]

Originally Posted by Arbitrary

The short story was what, 6 pages or something? Been a while since I read it.

Time traveling big game hunters go back in time to hunt dinosaurs. Want to kill a T-Rex? K, we find one just about to die normally and kill it right before it does. In the story they kill a T-Rex and a lightning strikes a tree that falls on the now made corpse T-Rex. Some guy squashes a butterfly and poof! When they return the politicians in the next election have switched places in their ideology. The peace guy is all war war war.

That's it, that's the whole story. They spent 80 million how?

Not really a fair analogy. There's been plenty of movies based on short story premises that have turned out quite well. Blade Runner, Minority Report, Shawshank Redemption and many others have shown this. Likewise this very premise has been done a few times, in some cases quite well. The Butterfly Effect is one of the most recent, which I personally liked though many others didn't. You can reduce every movie down to its logline and wonder how they could possibly spend the budgets they did on it.

[Arbitrary]

Sure, some short stories (Minority Report as I understand it) get made into movies that have hardly anything to do with the original story. That just means there was no reason to use the original as a basis anyway, as it is unrecognizable beyond it's core concepts (maybe) to anyone who read it.

And Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption is over a hundred pages long (making it a novella, and not a short story) and is essentially the film's script.