Review of A Sound of Thunder (2005) by Adam F — 17 Aug 2014

"A Sound of Thunder": smart premise, dumb movie. It's 2055 and humanity has perfected and commercialized time travel. For a significant fee, the wealthy get to hunt dinosaurs courtesy of Time Safari Inc. The trips are set under very specific rules to avoid altering history. The hunters are brought along with a team to the past, where they find an Allosaurus (a large, meat-eating dinosaur similar to the Tyrannosaurus). As it wanders in a tar pit, moments away from certain death at the hands of a volcanic eruption the team emerges from a portal. Using frozen nitrogen bullets, they kill the animal, tape the whole thing as a souvenir and return to the present. They travel on an invisible floating path (Sort of like a force field) to ensure that they do not disturb anything else because even the smallest change in the past could have titanic consequences in the future! On one such excursion, something goes wrong. The weapon held by the lead member, Travis (Edward Burns) malfunctions and in a panic, the two businessmen being escorted by the employees of Time Safari are left unattended for a few moments. Travis manages to get the weapon working again, kills the dinosaur and everyone makes it back to the present. Travis notices a day later that the present as we know it is changing. When he asks the inventor of the time machine software, Sonia Rand (Catherine McCormack) about it, she tells him that the only explanation for the changes and the malfunctioning computer at Time Safari is that someone has made a change in the past. The alterations are small at first but within a couple of days we've got a new species of deadly plants engulfing skyscrapers, cities being torn apart, swarms of killer insects, packs of carnivorous dinosaur descendants attacking humanity and it's only a matter of time before the human race as we know it ceases to exist completely. The team at Time Safari, along with Sonia must find a way to return to that fateful trip that went wrong and prevent whatever changed everything from happening.

When you hear about the premise of the movie, it actually sounds pretty awesome. We've got a dinosaur safari, time travel, killer bugs, killer plants and some pretty high stakes. What could go wrong? The biggest flaw with the film is that it's nowhere near as intelligent as it should be and is riddled with scientific errors. There are many theories on how time travel should work but from the premise, you can tell which one this story is going with. Time travel is possible and furthermore, you can alter the past and the present without blowing up the universe or accidentally erasing yourself from history. Unfortunately, this movie plays so fast and loose with its own rules that it becomes an incomprehensible mess. Towards the middle of the movie, we learn that Time Safari actually escorts its customers to the same Allosaurus every time. Makes sense, because how many dinosaurs about to die by volcanic eruption are there really? But wait, that doesn't make any sense. Think about it. If customer A shoots down the dinosaur, then customer B would have to arrive earlier to ensure he/she can arrive before the dinosaur dies. But that would change the present because customer A would find itself in the presence of a very dead dinosaur when it arrived in the first place. If it's possible to kill the same animal over and over without affecting history, how is it possible that this one trip actually changed anything? On a side note, how lame is it that when you go back in time and shoot down a dinosaur, you're shooting down the exact same one as everybody else, under the exact same circumstances as everybody else?

Let's move on from that moment of nonsense. Let's just say "ok, they made a mistake, just ignore that one". But the movie is filled with events and plot elements that make no sense. Let's say you find yourself in this situation where time is being altered. Maybe what you would do is... travel back in time a couple of days before the trip that went wrong and prevent the whole incident from happening by making sure those guns work ok, or maybe leave yourself a note? That would be the smart thing to do, but it's not what they do in this movie! This is nonscience-fiction! Our team of geniuses decide that to change the past, they need to go back to the exact moment where things went wrong, observe it and then fix it. Seems to me that it would be way easier to just not go on the initial problematic trip than to go back in time, way back to the time of dinosaurs and risk accidentally erasing something important from history. To further demonstrate how stupid this movie is, look at the way that the changes appear in the present. When the changes happen, it's described as a "time wave", it's a wave of changes, ripples in history that affect each other. These changes increase in severity as more and more of these small modifications pile up and affect the flora and fauna of Earth. Humanity is suddenly stuck in a world it doesn't understand because of something that was altered in the past. We're told that humans are the last species to be affected because "We're the last species to evolve". Did the writer even understand how evolution works? Living things do not have a predetermined "final evolution" like in Pokémon. Each generation is constantly adapting to its environment as climates and food supplies change. Successful species procreate while natural selection eliminates mutations that create undesirable or inefficient designs. You can never know how something is going to evolve, it just sort of happens. Maybe if the reason we are not immediately, physically affected was that we were the cause of the change that would make sense, but this explanation just makes anyone who knows anything about biology want to dash their head against the wall. Towards the end of the film, we actually do see humanity change into something completely different from what we're used to, but it just goes on to create further problems with the plot. If humanity evolved into a race of fish-like creatures, wouldn't our civilization be... underwater instead of on land with the same cars and buildings we have now? I guess the ripples in time only affected history in a way that we still got every single development in human the past (otherwise, you know we probably wouldn't have invented the time machine in the first place).

Aside from the mistakes in science, it just isn't very cleverly set up as a story. It's the kind of film where when the whole world is coming to an end, this team of experts never think of contacting the police or the army for some help. Despite the fact that our heroes are being attacked by a flock of bat monsters and may hold the entire future of the human race in their hands, they just decide to take this mission on by themselves. This team of experts who are in no way qualified to handle the kind of action they find themselves in just decide to go gung-ho and explore the city on their own to save the universe. They're not even clever enough to carry weapons with them at all times. It's a movie where things often happen not because they make logical sense, but because the plot demands it. We get a scene were we see a woman get eaten alive by these carnivorous bugs (which never appear in the movie again). Seeing this, Travis and Sonia jump out of her apartment window, landing in a tree. This tree is as tall as a skyscraper though and the two of them must have been at least on the 10th floor. How did Travis, who initiated the jump know that the time wave that just passed was going to conveniently place a tree branch there and that they weren't going to fall to their deaths? How did later in the film, that sea monster know to break through the glass just at the right moment so it could snap up a secondary character in a dramatic fashion? How convenient is it that the hard drive powering the time machine also happens to be compatible with the particle accelerator used at the university nearby and that they can turn this particle accelerator into a time portal?

On top of all these problems, the special effects for this movie are terrible. You can give a lot of slack to a movie with a low budget if it's really smart or if it's older, but this train wreck was made in 2005 and the special effects look like they're from a cheap documentary about dinosaurs that aired on TV during the 90's. Right from the beginning of the movie you see the Allosaurus emerge through a forest of trees, which fall over like dry, wooden sticks without a single leaf on them. Even worse, this clip of the Allosaurus is repeated again whenever the team travel back in time so if you thought it looked bad once, here it is again, and again! In the present, the cars look needlessly futuristic. More like shoes or tissue boxes with wheels than vehicles and as our characters talk on the sidewalk, not a single one of them slows down, stops or drops off a passenger. Not only does it look cheap, but the movie is unimaginative. The "Time Wave" mentioned earlier is literally a wave that encircles the glove and makes changes to the environment. The way we are introduced to this time wave is completely nonsensical by the way. Sonia tells him to look out the widow and he sees it pass through the city. Apparently she has psychic powers that allowed her to know this was coming and no one noticed this enormous time-distortion passing by during the previous 24 hours. Why do the changes happen every 24 hours by the way? Do chronological anomalies work 9-5 jobs like humans do?

The story is filled with clichéd characters. Ben Kingsley (one again in a terrible film) plays an amoral businessman, who delights his clients with talks that would make snake-oil salesmen blush. While he is able to charge pretty much anything he wants for these trips, he is still looking to cut costs and corners... at the expense of all of humanity! Meanwhile, Sonia is the scientist that mourns her invention being used for commercial uses. Don't they see that tampering with time will eventually result in death to us all?! Maybe people would take her more seriously if she hadn't wasted countless hours programming the time machine's computer with a sassy attitude. Our main character Travis is incredibly bland. We get a few scenes early on when he tells the audience and Sonia what he's all about but quickly degenerates into a typical action hero. Everyone else, forget about them, they're about as animated as the dead Allosaurus.

It's a movie where humanity is unable to fight off a race of carnivorous baboon-like dinosaur descendants. These animals are not any more intelligent than you standard lion or other large carnivore but when the stuff hits the fan here, it hits it so hard the whole world forgets everything it knows and devolves (not literally) into cavemen. It's a movie that looks bad from the beginning but gets worse and worse as it goes along. In a way, it's a perfect analogy for itself. A small mistake in the beginning of the production, a single person who didn't understand the intent and ideas behind the original short story stepped in the wrong spot and created these waves of problems, which only increase as the story goes by. It would be a terrific bad movie if it wasn't for the fact that it's extremely boring to watch. You just want it to go full throttle into idiocy and become a bad action movie with killer baboon-dinosaurs but it insists on trying to have some brains. If the concept interests you, just read the short story or even watch that old Simpsons Halloween special where Homer has a time-travelling toaster. "A Sound of Thunder" wants to be an action-packed adventure science-fiction movie with a brain, but it's simply a bad movie. (November 29, 2013).