About the best that can be said for it is that it might be appreciated ages hence as purest camp. Frankly, I'm not willing to wait around long enough to find out.
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Ray Bradbury has long been a master of sci-fi/fantasy, with titles like "The Martian Chronicles," "Fahrenheit 451," "The Illustrated Man," "R Is For Rocket," "Dandelion Wine," and "Something Wicked This Way Comes," among so many more. But his works have never translated well to the screen, perhaps because his stories are so poetic, depending largely on the sound of words and the power of imagination. Somehow, when filmmakers try to bring his images to life, the results are not often up to the written descriptions Bradbury provides. So it goes with "A Sound of Thunder," based on the 1952 Bradbury short story.
To say that director Peter Hyams has done better work would be an understatement. After movies like "The Star Chamber," "Outland," "2010," "Running Scared," "The Presidio," and "Timecop," his 2005 release "A Sound of Thunder" feels like an episode from the old "Time Tunnel" TV series. There isn't a shred of credibility in the new movie on which to hang one's suspension of disbelief, the whole thing turning Bradbury's clever little idea of evolution gone amuck into a preposterous and corny motion-picture extravaganza.
The movie's preface tells us, "In the year 2055 a new technology was invented that could change the world...or destroy it. A man named Charles Hatton used it to make money."
Chicago, half a century from now, Mr. Hatton (Sir Ben Kingsley) and his Time Safari, Inc. are more than happy to get rich off wealthy, often dense tourists who want to go back in time and hunt dinosaurs. Apparently, they never read Bradbury's short story, or they would know what could go wrong in the present if only the slightest thing went awry in the past. The movie shows us everything that could go wrong, including the ridiculous.
I always have the same problem with all these time-travel stories, and that is the so-called "grandfather paradox." Carl Sagan described it best when he said, "you travel into the past and murder your own grandfather before he sires your mother or your father, and where does that then leave you? Do you instantly pop out of existence because you were never made? Or are you in a new causality scheme in which, since you are there you are there, and the events in the future leading to your adult life are now very different? The heart of the paradox is the apparent existence of you, the murderer of your own grandfather, when the very act of you murdering your own grandfather eliminates the possibility of you ever coming into existence."
But we are never supposed to question the logic of time travel in science fiction, and I usually don't in novels like "The Time Machine" or films like "Kate & Leopold," when the rest of the story is fun or exciting or engrossing. But when you combine the illogic of time travel with a totally absurd action-adventure plot, the result is often something less than satisfactory.
OK, here are the three cardinal rules of time travel, according to Time Safari, Inc.: (1) No matter how small, never change anything in the past; (2) don't leave anything behind; and (3) don't bring anything back. Somehow, when Bradbury wrote about these things, we cared. In this movie, it merely seems like painting by the numbers, as characters break each of the rules, and world havoc results.
The star of the show is Edward Burns as Travis Ryer, the calm, cool, macho team leader of the "time jumps." He's basically a hunk who has to fight the women off, including the daughter of one his recent clients. We know he's a good guy because he tells us he's in the time-travel business for the science, not the money (unlike his boss, Charles Hatton). Unfortunately, Burns is the least-animated action hero in memory. No matter how desperate the situation, he never seems in the least disturbed nor ever breaks the same bland facial expression. "We'll set things straight" is his attitude toward everything that goes wrong. If he doesn't care, why should we?
His time-travel team, the group that leads the tourists on their expeditions back 65,000,000 years, is composed of three other stereotypical individuals: Jenny Krase (Jemima Rooper), a beautiful young female scientist; Marcus Payne (David Oyelowo), a handsome, young black technician; and Dr. Lucas (Wilfried Hochholdinger), a handsome, young German physician. The only other person of significance is Dr. Sonia Rand (Catherine McCormack), another beautiful female scientist, this one the person who actually developed the time-travel concept and is now mad at the way it is being corrupted.
It's easy to see at the film's outset that everything that could go wrong will go wrong. You remember Bradbury's butterfly effect? One of the expedition steps on a butterfly and disrupts the whole of Earth's evolution in a series of "time waves." Every few hours after the catastrophe, the world changes drastically. The weather keeps changing; plants grow wild; cities become jungles; reptiles turn into dinosaurs. The only way to reverse the damage is another time jump, but wouldn't you know it, the government's bureaucratic overseer won't allow it; he thinks it might be too dangerous. No matter that in a few more days, all of Mankind will be extinct. And the national government and the armed forces are nowhere to be found.
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[release]17708[/release]