Review of A Sound of Thunder (2005) by Markb. — 09 Sep 2005

Somebody's got to defend this movie, by gum, and I guess I'm the man for the job! Yes, it does have some obvious green-screen and rear-projection work, and yes, the Tyrannosaurus Rex that figures in the opening action sorta looks like he needs to be returned to Macy's in time for the Thanksgiving Day parade, but who says every movie involving dinosaurs has to be visually on a par with or beyond Jurassic Park? One person's "shoddy and unconvincing" can be another person's "charmingly old-fashioned", and A Sound of Thunder is still eons closer to vintage Ray Harryhausen than to Bert I.

Gordon. And some of the visuals really DO work: the various creatures that attack our heroes, heroines and bystanders in the altered future are far more imaginative and variegated than the CGI-wallpaper that enveloped Stephen Sommers' godawful Mummy movies; the filmmakers' version of downtown Chicago (which I recently visited) 50 years hence is surprisingly witty and well-observed; and I loved the solid/transparent/flowing "pathway to the past" that visitors took in order to hunt and kill a prehistoric beast.

Director Peter Hyams has been doing mostly sci-fi and action flicks for over 30 years now; like fellow warhorses Richard Fleischer and the late J. Lee Thompson, his stuff can be remarkably pretentious, badly conceived and dull (remember 2010, possibly a leading contender for the most uncalled-for movie sequel ever made?).

..but like those other two craftsmen, he's also perfectly capable at turning out a nifty, enjoyably fast-paced entertainment. Nobody's going to rank this with Gandhi or House of Sand and Fog as containing one of the all-time great Ben Kingsley performances, but he's very amusingly hammy as the greedy, duplicitous proprietor of the potentially dangerous time-travel device--his amusement park capitalist is actually much closer to the conception of same in Michael Crichton's original novel Jurassic Park than Richard Attenborough's teddy-bear interpretation in that film; Ed Burns isn't exactly in my Top 100 as viable action movie heroes go, but since every moment he spent filming this was one he WASN'T spending writing or directing one of his allegedly true-to-life, annoyingly twee romances like The Brothers McMullen or She's The One, who's to complain? Again, I don't see much point in griping about ANY of A Sound of Thunder if you view it in the right perspective: a 12-year-old watching it in 1957 would think it was the coolest movie in the world.

And even though part of this has to do with Warner Bros. treating the film like something it found on its shoe and waiting THREE YEARS to release it, the fact that it's a movie version/expansion of a piece of literature (a beloved Ray Bradbury short story) in a summer even more filled than usual with sequels, remakes and equally unnecessary TV show adaptations, in itself makes A Sound of Thunder kinda cool, too.