Un coup de tonnerre

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

I just saw this movie this evening as part of a promotional screening. This movie wants to be a strong moral tale about how humans should not mess with time travel for fear of disturbing our natural evolution. However good Ed Burns is as the lead, you are never convinced by the story as it is full of clichés and seemingly tacked-on action sequences. They get chased by monsters for so much of the movie you start to ask yourself it they got confused between the sci-fi and horror genres. The special effects are plentiful, however they are atrocious, fake and gratuitous in the sense that the camera lingers on CG monsters and landscapes for so long that it seems perhaps they wanted to show off how much money they spent. But it adds nothing to the otherwise weak plot, which - now that I think of it - has a simplistic comic-book quality to it. But if the latter were completely true it should be more surreal and not have so much awful superfluous dialogue that actually just sounds like it is set on repeat ('you don't know what you are messing with in time travel..' and the like). If you happen to have nothing else to see, rent Timecop. Yes, this movie is that bad. P.S. Ben Kingsley, why did you do this movie? After seeing you in so many wonderful movies, even as a great villain in Sexy Beast, this performance just looked like you were making a bad used-car salesman impression.

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.

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

http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/