A Sound of Thunder (film)

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A Sound of Thunder
Image:A Sound of Thunder poster.jpg
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
All Movie Guide 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]

Contents

[edit] Cast

[edit] Plot

According to the film, the established rules of time travel are:

  1. Don't bring anything back.
  2. Don't leave anything behind.
  3. Don't change anything in the past.

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 just off the path.

On the next expedition, Ryer is taking two other hunters on the time travel safari. He states that they are about to witness a volcanic eruption, but the volcano 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 an experimental portal.

They manage to reach the university, but thanks to the various 'evolutionised' creatures and plants, 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

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. (Presumably, the screenwriters were harking back to the tagline for Jurassic Park: "An Adventure 65 Million Years In The Making")

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 any object 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. This uncertainty in knowing these pairs of values is not due a defect in any instrument; it is a fundamental law of nature.

The film operates on the theory that changes made in the past affect the future gradually, in a series of "time waves" that flow across the planet and effecting changes in the timeline (compare the all-in-one "timequakes" of Millennium). Also, everyone is aware of the changes that are occurring. This is a different approach than the usual manner in which changes to timelines are handled in science fiction, where changes in the timeline are instantaneous, and characters are generally unaware that anything has changed. It is also inconsistent because the change to the timeline after the butterfly's death is undone instantaneously and no one remembers what happened in the timeline in which the butterfly died. Further, the characters in the movie seem to anticipate this inconsistency and take steps to exploit it. This is similar to the way time changes work in the Journeyman Project series of games.

The film states that humans will be affected last by the time waves because they are the last beings to evolve. The most basic understanding of evolutionary theory suggests that all living things evolve continuously, so humans cannot by any means be called the beings to have evolved most recently. Additionally, the particle accelerator and all buildings are still present after Rand is turned into a fish being. This makes no sense.

In the film, when the characters go back in time, they point out that a volcano is about to destroy the whole area. Logically, this means that the butterfly's death would have made no difference to the future timeline, as it was about to be destroyed by the volcanic eruption. Unless of course, logically, the butterfly flew away before the said eruption.

When Ryer travels back in time, he approaches only the one crew that caused the problem. Logically, if this is so, he should also see all the other crews before the one causing the accident. In fact all crews should see each other.

[edit] Trivia

  • 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]
  • The "Office Of Temporal Regulations," a newly-created governmental agency to regulate the new technology of time travel, is reminiscent of the Temporal Investigations division of Starfleet in the fictional universe of Star Trek, as well as the Time Enforcement Commission in the movie Timecop, and the Temporal Security Agency from the The Journeyman Project series of games.
  • In Travis' apartment in a Chicago highrise, banners of the Chicago Cubs' future World Series titles can be seen.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Cited in imdb.com.
  2. ^ 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.
  3. ^ Box office and business for A Sound of Thunder at imdb.com

[edit] External links

es:El sonido del trueno fr:A Sound of Thunder ru:И грянул гром (фильм)

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