A Sound of Thunder

I had only heard of this stinker in passing when it came out a few years ago. The title doesn't really give a whole lot of insight into what the film is about, and I think it spent all of one week in the theaters.

So before watching it the other night, I looked it up on IMDB and saw that it was a time-travel sci-fi kinda thing based on a short story by Ray Bradbury. And it starred Ed Burns, Ben Kingsley and a bunch of others. Now Burns is maybe one of the worst mainstream actors out there, but his films are usually OK. And Kingsley is a legend, although he has starred in some shitters before...so you never know.

I should've known with this one. What a fuggin' awful movie! The special effects were shit. Looks like it could have been made for a cable TV channel instead of a major movie company. I see on the trivia section of the site that the original production company went bankrupt during post-production...so that could explain it. Lemme put it this way: the blue-screen scene in the original Wayne's World movie (we're in Delaware...ugh) was far superior to the shot of Burns and his assistant walking through the streets of future NYC. I almost couldn't believe how bad the effects were in that shot...for a movie made in the 21st century!

The plot was shit too! This tech company figured out a way to use time travel to send rich assholes back in time to hunt dinosaurs. The only catch is that they couldn't affect anything from the past. No stepping off the "Jesus walked on the water" path that they send back in time. No killing of anything except the dino, which was about to die anyway by getting stuck in a tar pit and then covered with lava and ash from a volcano that is about to erupt. Nothing. They are absolutely adament that any change at all can cause drastic harm to the current timeline. Even the killing of an insect, because that insect could lay eggs that...blah, blah, blah.

(Sidebar: They must have really improved the carbon-dating process in the future to figure out when this specific dinosaur died to the exact minute. And that it all happened 5 minutes before a volcano was about to erupt. Truly amazing what they can do in a crap script!)

Dum, dum, duuuuuuuuuh!!!!

Guess what happens? One of the asshole, rich businessmen steps on a butterfly by accident. That tiny event causes waves of changes in the future. It doesn't matter that the butterfly was about to go extinct anyway because of the volcano that was 5 minutes away from exploding. Nah...not to our screenwriters, it doesn't. The changes to the future happen in waves, like the ripples from a stone thrown into the middle of a pond. Our heroes have to figure out a way to go back and give this poor butterfly another 5 minutes of life to preserve our future.

Ugh...that bored me just writing it!

You know what? Just don't see this movie. Period!