A Sound of Thunder (2005)

I heard the special effects in this movie was nothing to crow about. What I heard was right. While the dinosaur(s) - I'm not sure if plurality is warranted here - looked rather poorly modeled, the other creatures in the movie were passable. The story had so much potential but a rather poor script and lack of funding (I guess) ruined it. Despite all that, whatever remained was enough to carry me through the 95 minutes this movie ran. Ben Kingsley's talents were rather wasted, in my opinion. Overall, it starts off slow but picks up somewhere in the middle and keeps you interested if you are not the nitpicking type. Perhaps a better version or a similar story to it (with a bigger budget) will be released in the future.

Fmovies: Imagine a film student who's learning to use CGI technology for the first time. His final project in class is to create a full-length feature film using everything he's learned in class the entire semester. His film would be better than A Sound of Thunder.

It's Jurassic Park meets The Butterfly Effect, but it's total crap. The production of this futuristic, sci-fi tale (based on the classic Ray Bradbury short story) is pathetically cheap and completely distracts from an otherwise interesting story. It's 2055, and time travel is now possible. When a group of safari hunters travel back to prehistoric time to kill a tyrannosaurus Rex, an equipment failure causes one time traveler to panic and step on a butterfly, thus disrupting the entire evolution of life on earth.

Cool story, right? Poorly, poorly, poorly executed. The CGI dinosaur is a joke, as are all the other "creatures," and the futuristic outside shots are so lame you can practically see the green screen outline on the actors. Shot during the 2002 flooding of Prague, A Sound of Thunder was delayed for so long because the production company went bankrupt. And it shows.

I saw the movie poster for this and read a blurb, and though cool, my wife and I love action adventure sci-fi flicks. I ended up getting 2 free movie tickets from work and thought I'd take my wife to see this... What can i say? this movie is bad. Many times my wife and I snickered as the FX were not much better than what most any college kid with can do with their computer, a green blanket and a MiniDV cam. It was like watching something on Sci-Fi Channel at 1am on a slow holiday at home. the people in front of us got up and left, and never came back. there were only 8 or 9 of us in the theatre to begin with and there were only 2 times for this Film, which should of warned me especially since I had never seen any commercials or trailers for this ever before.

Sure there are some parts that were cool, and some interesting tidbits, but they were hard to follow. I am saddened that this guy Peter Hyams took a good story by Ray Bradbury and turned it into this crud.

Yep, this was at least a D movie... D for Dumb, Dismal, Disappointing, and D for Don't Go see this. If you like low end Movies go rent one at your video store or turn on your Cable TV.

A Sound of Thunder fmovies. I don't understand the vitriolic and negative reviews. Were those people expecting an informative documentary like on Discovery channel? And I don't think Ray Bradbury would be upset at the treatment his short story received. His story was fantasy, well-written and clever, and putting that on the screen would be a challenge. I think the writers, producers, director and actors have done a pretty-good job of it.

From memory, Bradbury's story ends when it is discovered that evolution has changed because of a tiny alteration in a time-travel incident. But that would make the movie 37 minutes long, so the modern writers have to find a remedy, and stretch it out to a reasonable length.

Ryer (Burns) knows what has to be done and he has to get the inventor of the TAMI machine, Sonia Rand, (Catherine McCormack) to help, but New York is now a jungle and there are hordes of ape-lizards, and ape-bats and nasty eagles too. They have to get to a university with a working particle accelerator. What a challenge, through the flooded subway and always pursued by monsters.

Suspend ones reasoning, just take it for a way-out fantasy. And it looks better when watched for a second or third time.

The story is good, the characters are well-defined, the acting is good, (especially that of a support character Eccles (William Armstrong) who is absolutely terrified), and there is some memorable dialogue, so I've given it a 7.

For once, Catherine McCormack doesn't even get kissed!

Yeah sure, the movie its visuals already did looked horrible and not very promising but the premise and the cast looked good, so I still sort of expected to be entertained by this movie. This however unfortunately wasn't the case. The premise is good but the story is filled with improbabilities and is logically flawed.

This movie is potential flushed down the toilet. The main plot is interesting and somewhat original. It's good enough to make a good adventurous movie out of would you think. This movie however fails to entertain and I think that that is this movie biggest flaw. Perhaps it takes itself too serious and a little bit more humor certainly wouldn't had done the movie any harm. Instead it now is nothing more than a lame and cheap looking movie, filled with the one unlikely event after the other, that also steals a bit too much from other, more successful movies. Mainely "Jurassic Park" obviously.

The characters also don't help to make the movie any more compelling or at least interesting to watch. I still think that Edward Burns did a fairly decent job as the 'heroic' main lead. The rest of the characters however really get muddled in into the movie and they get very little interesting to do. The movie rather relies on its visual, which are extremely poor. Catherine McCormack also plays a very irritating character. Basically all her character does is complain and talk about how right she was and the rest oh so wrong. Her character just isn't a likable one. And the rest of the characters...well I already have forgotten their names, I think that that is saying enough about them. It certainly is true though that Ben Kingsley's performance alone makes this movie worth watching. He is really excellent in his sort of villainous businessman role but from the moment when he disappears out of the movie the movie really goes downhill rapidly.

Visually the movie is extremely poor. It has some dreadful looking CGI effects and they couldn't even get the more simple 'blue-screen' effects look convincing in the movie. The sets are also awful and cheap looking, like they can fall over and break down every moment.

The movie never gets tense, exciting or adventurous since the story is brought in the least interesting and engaging way possible. It's a very distant movie with distant characters that fails to impress. There are plenty of action sequences but all of them are so ridicules looking and far from believable that they never get tense or good enough.

So basically this movie is lacking in everything that is needed to make a genre movie like this one a good and successful one. It's sad to see how low director Peter Hyams has sunk to the last couple of years, after making some good movies in the '70's and '80's.

4/10

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USAToday.com called it: "A story that is a pale imitation of a Michael Crichton novel." The Los Angeles Times said: "The picture looks as murky as its story lineÂ… and most everything on the screen looks patently fake." CNN.com remarked: "'Sound of Thunder,' smell of garbage." But Variety.com summed it up nicely: "Every bit as bad as advance buzz has indicated..." And then some.

I first heard about this movie prior to its release on TVGuide.com's "Coming Soon" section. The single-sentence description suggesting a plot around time traveling safaris for the sole purpose of killing a Tyrannosaurus Rex that was going to die anyhow just seemed, wellÂ… a bit loopy, at least for a major motion picture. So I read the short story by Ray Bradbury, upon which the movie was supposedly based and, even though I had a hard time visualizing such a story expanded to 2 hours of running and screaming on the big screen, hoped for the best. After hearing and reading all of the dramatically poor reviews by movie critics and fans alike, curiosity got the best of me. I wanted to know if it was really that bad.

It is. It is every bit as bad. In fact, a half-hour into the film, I was completely alone, free to yawn, stretch, scream at the top of my lungs and move about the theater.

The basic premise is relatively simple, as it was a short story to begin with. In the year 2055, time travel has been patented by a greedy businessman played by none other than Sir Ben Kingsley (as he's credited), sporting a white wig that one movie critic likened to a lump of cotton candy, and yet another likened to a massive White Persian cat perched atop his head. I prefer the latter analogy. Time Safari, Inc. offers rich people a chance to travel 65 million years into the past to kill – not hunt – dinosaurs already predestined to die at the same place and time. As long as the merry band of time travelers remains on a path resembling transparent liquid metal that hovers above the terrain and do not interfere with the environment in any way, history and evolution as we know it are still preserved. Of course, the rigid controls supposed to be in effect are futile against a cowardly inept rich snob who carelessly stomps on a butterfly.

The Butterfly Effect is, of course, the theory that maintains that a butterfly's wings flapping on one side of the earth could eventually cause a hurricane thousands of miles away. In the movie, the effect causes ripples in time, i.e. a tidal wave in the form of a series of 'Time Waves' that exactly resemble and mimic the aquatic version, visibly sweeping over the Windy City at distant intervals and knocking the main characters around in Matrix-like slow motion shots. Immediately following each successive time wave, hideous distortions abound in the form of primordial and deadly vegetation, half-primate, half-reptilian creatures with the need to feed (on humans), giant reptilian bats, and not to be outdone, a brief cameo by the man-eating scarab beetles of 'The Mummy' fame. Seriously.

But enough about the pathetically stupid script. I wanted to know if the special effects were really as bad as people claimed. At one point, the camera tracks the two main stars, Edward Burns and Catherine McCormack, as they cross a busy futuristic street in one of the worst on-screen examples of green-screen effects I have ever witnessed in a big budget movie. I can't readily explain it with words – when you see it, you're simpl