A Sound of Thunder (film)
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| A Sound of Thunder | |
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| Directed by | Peter Hyams |
| Produced by | Renny Harlin Elie Samaha Howard Baldwin |
| Written by | Ray Bradbury (short story) Thomas Dean Donnelly Gregory Poirier Joshua Oppenheimer |
| Starring | Edward Burns Ben Kingsley Catherine McCormack |
| Music by | Nick Glennie-Smith |
| Cinematography | Peter Hyams |
| Editing by | Sylvie Landra |
| Distributed by | Warner Bros. |
| Release date(s) | September 2, 2005 |
| Running time | 103 minutes |
| Language | English |
| Budget | ~ US$52,000,000 |
| Allmovie profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
A Sound of Thunder is a 2005 film directed by Peter Hyams, which is loosely based on the short story of the same name by Ray Bradbury.
The movie was originally planned for a 2002 release. However, flooding in Prague (where the movie was shot) and other financial difficulties--including the bankruptcy of the original production company during post-production[1]--resulted in a delayed release.
The film received overwhelmingly negative critical reviews.[2] Common complaints against the film included its poor special effects, uninvolved performances, scientific errors, and lack of respect for its source material. As a result of poor reviews and lack of promotion, the film--which was estimated to have cost $52 million--grossed less than $8 million in worldwide release.[3]
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[edit] Cast
- Edward Burns: Travis Ryer
- Catherine McCormack: Sonia Rand
- Ben Kingsley: Charles Hatton
- Jemima Rooper: Jenny Krase
- Wilfried Hochholdinger: Dr. Lucas
- August Zirner: Clay Derris
- Corey Johnson: Christian Middleton
[edit] Plot
According to the film, the established rules of time travel are:
- Don't change anything in the past.
- Don't leave anything behind.
- Don't bring anything back.
These rules were established by a businessman who has recently developed a service, based around a newly invented time machine, which offers prehistoric safari trips to wealthy hunters. Travis Ryer has been trained to lead these safaris. On one of these time-safaris, the guides are escorting two men along a path. They are attacked by an Allosaurus and the leader's gun fails, so the allosaurus does not die when it was scheduled to do so--thus breaking one of the rules of time travel.
Panicked by the attack, one of the explorers steps off the path in an attempt to ensure his own safety. The guides exchange gun parts with another gun, kill the allosaurus and return through the time portal. Unseen to the explorers, a muddy footprint has been left on the path, indicating that someone has stepped off of it.
On the next expedition, Ryer is taking two other hunters on the time travel safari. As they wait for the Allosaurus to arrive, Ryer checks his watch, realizes it's late and that the Allosaurus should've already arrived. Instead, they find it has already died. Furthermore, the volcano, which erupts after the explorers return to the future, is already in the process of erupting, and they are forced to return to the present.
The time safari business calls on Sonia Rand, who invented the time travel machine, but she refuses to help anyone. Rand does explain that since they altered something in the past, the future will proceed to change in a series of "time waves." She says that the changes can't all happen at once, and that they will proceed in order of evolution: first, everything will reset, then the vegetation will change, then wildlife, and finally humans.
The business attempts to send Ryer back to fix the past, but a time wave hits and all the electricity goes out. Ryer and Rand must determine what caused the change before he can fix the past. They discover that a butterfly was stepped on during one trip into the past, and it critically altered the evolutionary chain. Another time wave hits just before they reach the portal and they must continue on foot. They reach the portal, but it doesn't work, so they decide to try to reach the university where there is a particle accelerator which can be modified with software to function like a time machine,TAMI's hardrive is needed,therefore they salvage it.
They manage to reach the university, but various creatures(such as a monster that looks like a cross between a dinosaur and a baboon) attacks the group, eventually only Ryer and Rand are still alive. Rand manages to send Ryer back 65,000,001 years to dodge the time waves, then he is sent forward one year to the point when the original explorers traveled into the past. In the present, the final time wave hits and Rand is turned into a fishlike being. Meanwhile, Ryer tells the explorers about everything that will happen in the future. He stops the explorer from stepping off the path and killing the butterfly, and thus the future is saved.
Back in the present, Ryer is shown the video of the alternate Ryer who saved the future. He requests that they shut down the time portal to stop such an occurrence from ever happening again.
[edit] Scientific and logical inaccuracies
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This article or section is missing citations or needs footnotes. Using inline citations helps guard against copyright violations and factual inaccuracies. (March 2007) |
In the film, Time Safari, Inc. claims to take people back in time 65 million years. However, Allosaurus lived during the Jurassic Period, which ended 145 million years ago.
After the crew returns from the trip, Ryer talks to Payne about the malfunction. Payne then mentions the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and that is says nothing can be certain. Actually, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle does not state that "nothing can be certain". It states that the momentum and position of a particle cannot both be exactly known. As the precision with which one of these properties is known increases, the precision of the other property decreases. Similarly, with time and energy. The uncertainty in knowing these pairs of values is not due to a defect in any instrument; it is a fundamental law of nature.
[edit] Notes
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- At the beginning of the film, during a speech comparing the accomplishment of time travel to other great accomplishments in history, a "landing on Mars" is mentioned as being accomplished by an astronaut named "Brubaker." This refers to the 1970s sci-fi movie Capricorn One, also directed by Peter Hyams, in which a character named Commander Charles Brubaker--played by actor James Brolin--was to have been the first man on Mars.[citation needed]
- In Travis' apartment in a Chicago highrise, banners of the Chicago Cubs' future World Series titles can be seen.
- Director Renny Harlin was originally hired to direct and Pierce Brosnan was to star.[citation needed]
[edit] References
- ^ Cited in imdb.com.
- ^ The critical roundup website Rotten Tomatoes reported that out of 88 reviews of the film, 81 reviewers gave it a poor rating; the film scored an average rating of 2.8 out of 10.
- ^ Box office and business for A Sound of Thunder at imdb.com
