A Sound of Thunder
Director: Peter Hyamns
Grade:D+

The best part about watching a truly horrendous movie is the pleasure one gets when reconsidering the questionable material the following day. This week’s pop-trash drug of choice happened to be the reprehensible Ray Bradbury adaptation A Sound of Thunder; a film whose theatrical release was so short-lived many don’t even recall it ever existed, including Ben Kingsley, who stars in, but doesn’t remember shooting, the film.

If I were to cite a clear example of the antithesis of ontological realism, A Sound of Thunder would prove to be exemplary. Feasibly, the film could have been shot just about anywhere (including its likely location: some guy’s basement) since not once does it appear as if the actors inhabit the same space as the environment within which they supposedly engage one another. There was this old show that aired on Comedy Central a while back whose name I no longer recall (believe me, it causes me enough distress as it is to confess that I even watched it) in which actors played out unfunny little skits in a sort of spatial limbo represented by an entirely white background. The same physics dictate the environment in A Sound of Thunder, just substitute shoddy computer generated graphics (and we’re talking bad, as in 1992 PC game bad) of a futuristic Chicago in place of the blank bluescreen and you’ve already begun to penetrate the spectacular flatness of this world. Those who criticized Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow for its labored visuals would implode at the sight of this.

But the visuals alone don’t do it justice. The story itself appears to have been ghostwritten by the same program used to design its special effects. These two appallingly horrid characteristics play off each other in some morbid ballet of bad-taste set to a nauseating funeral dirge of dubious scientific thought. Now, I’ve never read the Bradbury short story, but I have seen that Simpson’s Halloween Special based on it, and I can safely say that its internal logic remains far more airtight than what I witnessed in this debacle of a film.

Those not familiar with the idea may benefit from a brief rundown: in the future time travel is a reality that has already been harnessed by greedy corporations who provide millionaires with the opportunity to travel back in time and shoot at dinosaurs. The whole tour works provided that the balance of the moment is not upset in any way. The dinosaur they kill is about to die a moment later, the bullets they use dissolve after impact and they leave nothing behind and take nothing back because any slight disturbance to the past will be felt in the future. Sounds compelling, no? It may very well be, but this is hardly the screenplay for weighty exposition on the limitless possibilities of such a situation. No, of course not when you can use such a setup to eventually introduce a baboon/lizard hybrid into the mix and fall back on Jurassic Park-style hijinks.

Time travel movies come with a built in zero-plausibility factor since the concept itself is impossible to rationalize, but even within this sub genre of science fiction, A Sound of Thunder still manages to outdo the rest in terms of sheer incompetence. As expected, during one of the numerous excursions into the past, something finally does go wrong causing a ripple in time that eventually works its way into the present. Now, assuming that what went wrong in the past would have already been 65 million years in the making when our voyagers return from their journey, the effects of the ripple should have already taken effect, thusly the future should now appear vastly different. If you thought that like everyone else did you’d be dead wrong. No, as the movie explains the effects of that ripple are not unlike throwing a stone into water. The changes come in waves, effecting things lower on the evolutionary ladder first and moving upwards toward more complex organisms. Why? I suppose so the movie would seem more exciting. Sadly, it isn’t. Between the baboon-lizards, the oversized bats, and killer plants, I couldn’t think of another movie more vacuous and unexciting.

In the end, one question proved thoroughly vexing for both my friend and I: if these Time Safari patrols continually arrive at the exact same moment in the past, why don’t they ever encounter previous expeditions? We struggled with the concept for a while and I suggested that maybe since they occupy the same exact space at exactly the same moment perhaps their current state of being overwrites their previous incarnation in that moment. Not the best theory, to be sure, but when dealing with a film like this, anything works. If only someone could travel back in time to the exact moment of this film’s conception and overwrite it with something better, like a sequel to the Butterfly Effect. Now that would be worth the time!

Note: those of you who live in Chicago will be especially baffled by the futuristic depiction of the Loop, complete with pointless catwalks stretching between buildings and towering skyscrapers that serve no discernable architectural logic.