Tanya Batson-Savage, Freelance Writer
A scene from the movie 'A Sound Of Thunder'. - CONTRIBUTED
THE SOUND of silence, or even the sound of water dripping from a tap, would have been a much better alternative to A Sound of Thunder. The movie, directed by Peter Hyams, is a stellar example of bad movie-making.
A Sound of Thunder is the kind of film that one can only look at with awe as one contemplates that someone wrote it, someone directed it, someone edited it and none of them had the decency to say "Stop for the love of humanity". It is even more awesome when one realises that three people, Thomas Dean Donnelly, Joshua Oppenheimer and Gregory Porier actually claim to have written the screenplay. This defies the notion that two heads are better than one.
A Sound of Thunder is replete with plot holes in which a time warp would have got lost. The film is based on a Ray Bradbury short story. It surrounds a time travel company, which is selling explorations into the past. The possible negative impact of this is that even the tiniest adjustment can affect evolution.
SAVE THE WORLD
Of course, this eventually happens and it is up to the group of scientists to save the world before they too are affected by evolution and become something else. Of course, by the end of the movie, if you are able to stay through to the end, you kind of wish that evolution would remake us so that this movie would never have been made in the first place.
Time travel is something which continues to fascinate and the story's premise is whole enough. It is the holes which are then drilled into it that makes A Sound of Thunder laughably bad. Indeed, had it not been at times so painful to watch it may have proved funnier.
The flick stars Edward Burns (Travis Ryer), Ben Kingsley (Charles Hatton) and Catherine McCormack (SoniaRand). None of them do anything to help the flick nor, do the rest of the cast. One can only be glad as they are killed off because it means that the more of them die, the quicker the movie will end.
The graphics also did not help. Sci-fi movies are propelled by either the magnitude of the imagination which creates them or the mastery with which such imaginations are executed. They often function on larger than life characters who make us glad to be alive. A Sound of Thunder, had none of these.
Apparently, in keeping with the prehistoric theme, the computer generated images were themselves taken from the prehistoric era of cinema. Some of the animals seemed to have been directly ripped from the original Japanese version of Godzilla.
Of course it is quite possible that the creators of the show decided to finish it simply because they had already gone too far, once the project had been started. The entire movie should have been lost on the editing floor, or better yet the film should have been burnt and the ashes buried.
