In the year 2055, Charles Hatton (Ben Kingsley) has created Time Safari, a company that books expensive time travel hunting trips for rich people enabling them to hunt dinosaurs. Participants in the safari are given explicit instructions not to touch anything or leave any trace of their presence. In doing so, they could disrupt evolution and sabotage the present without even realizing it.
If you’re wondering how they can kill a dinosaur without leaving any traces on the future, the answer is that each “time safari” is actually a scripted event. The same dinosaur is killed each time. The hunters are taken back in time just minutes before the dinosaur in question was about to step into a tar pit, get stuck, and then be destroyed by an erupting volcano. With or without the hunters, the same dinosaur would die and be eradicated without any trace. Hence, no trace of the hunters’ interference will be left on the future as long as nothing else is left behind or changed.
Sounds like a decent enough plan but, of course, when a glaring weakness like destroying the future is as simple as leaving the most insignificant mark on the past, do you really think humans won’t make that mistake? Well, if so, A Sound of Thunder wouldn’t have much of a plot.
Based on a Ray Bradbury short story, A Sound of Thunder takes this interesting concept and makes a moderately entertaining, if heavily flawed, film out of it. Bradbury’s original story was more philosophical and open-ended. The movie tries to graft an action-oriented, monster-evading romp into it. The middle part of the film, which was completely written for the screen and not part of Bradbury’s original plot, is a by-the-numbers, kill-or-be-killed action quest that doesn’t mesh with the rest of the story. It might have been more successful if the dime-store computer effects didn’t take the whole production down a few notches.
Although it’s definitely flawed, A Sound of Thunder was nowhere near as awful as I’d been led to believe by other reviews. Sure, Ben Kingsley looks like Exeter from This Island Earth and Edward Burns’ scientist character occasionally lapses into an accent more suited to a dock worker, but the premise is just captivating enough to keep your interest to see what will happen next. Just barely.
2.5 out of 5.0 stars
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