Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on September 2, 2005, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
A Sound of Thunder demonstrates the true horror that can result from time travel. To wit, a film shot two years ago, by a now-bankrupt company, can suddenly appear in the present day to terrorize audiences. This stupefyingly awful sci-fi thriller from Franchise Pictures, the outfit that brought us gems like Battlefield: Earth, FearDotCom and 3000 Miles to Graceland, could have been, at the very least, a cheesily entertaining creature feature. Yet it insists on behaving like a serious, speculative cautionary tale, despite being based on a scientific premise that is utterly fallacious.
The movie is inspired by the classic and influential story by Ray Bradbury, who may well now be rolling in his grave even though he’s still alive. The tale tells of a futuristic hunting expedition back into the prehistoric past, where those taking part are warned not to step off an artificial elevated path, lest even the most minor damage to the past have tragic repercussions in the future. The opening sequence of the film is, some dumb dialogue excepted, pretty much to the Bradbury letter, as a Time Safari party arrives in the middle of a prehistoric swamp, there to kill a dinosaur that, prior research has found, is about to expire anyway. (The hunters visit what we’re told is the Cretaceous period, though their quarry is an Allosaurus, which lived in the Jurassic; clearly the filmmakers didn’t want to invoke the J-word and remind viewers of better movies on the same subject.)
Needless to say, someone does slip from the path, with grave consequences once the group returns to 2055. Now, logic dictates that any alteration in the time continuum would have instant repercussions on the future—that once our heroes return to their own era, the results of the tampering would have long since taken effect. Instead, screenwriters Thomas Dean Donnelly, Joshua Oppenheimer and Gregory Poirier have come up with the nonsensical idea of “time waves,” ripples from the past that gradually effect the changes in the film’s “present.” First the climate gets warmer. Then the vegetation starts to get feisty, with large vines and oversized trees bursting from the pavement and overtaking Chicago. The next wave brings alterations in animal evolution, leaving the city infested with hungry critters best described as baboonosauruses. The final sweep, we’re told, will deposit the result of a distinct human evolution on the planet. After hearing that, I tried hard to avoid the giggle-inducing thought of one of those baboonosauruses walking upright wearing a suit and tie, but it wasn’t easy.
All of this, of course, is pure hogwash on a scientific level, and A Sound of Thunder doesn’t even make it palatable on its own pulpy terms. Nor is it true to Bradbury, who imagined quite reasonably that the hunting team would return to an already-changed Earth, and more ambitiously posited that humans would evolve physically the same, but with alterations in behavior and outlook. The makers of the film version have no such aspirations (not to mention that, divorced from its literary source, the title no longer has any connection to the narrative), and are content to let the production design do the storytelling for them. There are endless scenes of the characters wandering through urban environments overrun by the hyperactive plantlife, going through the motions of a plot that inexorably crumbles into ridiculousness. It could be said that some of the developments—particularly the way in which the heroes finally solve the problem—have to be seen to be believed, except that would suggest that one actually sit through the rest of the movie to see them.
Director Peter Hyams previously did a much more persuasive job piloting the monster action of The Relic and the temporal shenanigans of TimeCop—and when the more plausible of two time-travel flicks on a filmmaker’s résumé is the one starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, you know something’s wrong. Here his action staging is listless, and he seems content to present the narrative and dialogue hokum at face value. He gets no assist in the former from the visual FX team, whose work is notably unconvincing (when the hunters first face the Allosaurus, you could be forgiven for thinking their expedition is supposed to be a virtual-reality simulation rather than the real thing), or in the latter from the cast.
As the creator of the time-travel technology who gets in a snit about its exploitation, good actress Catherine McCormack tries too hard; as the time-safari leader and ultimate hero, Edward Burns doesn’t try nearly hard enough. Most hapless of all is poor Ben Kingsley as Time Safari’s head honcho—chewing the scenery, looking forever on the verge of bolting to call his agent and, with his white fright wig and eccentric demeanor, leaving you wondering when this Oscar-winning actor started taking the parts Malcolm McDowell turned down. The trickiest performance is given by Prague, which looks for all the world like Montreal as it attempts to stand in for Chicago.
About the only positive thing one can say about A Sound of Thunder is that in a year that has already brought us Alone in the Dark and The Brothers Grimm, it doesn’t automatically jump straight to the top of the list of 2005’s most painful genre disasters. But it may be the most squanderous of a potentially provocative premise—which is not to say it doesn’t leave the audience with questions. For example: If, as we’re told, the Time Safaris all go back to kill the same dinosaur at the same time, how come the expeditions never run into each other?
