Director-cinematographer Peter Hyams’ ambitious but majorly disappointing “A Sound of Thunder” suggests two things: One, a large-scale sci-fi disaster movie must have state-of-the-art special effects to have a prayer of succeeding.
| A disaster: This adaptation of a classic science-fiction tale from Ray Bradbury gets mangled in its translation to the big screen.
Rated: PG-13 rating is for violence, partial nudity, language Now showing: Everett 9, Loews at Alderwood, Mountlake, Metro, Pacific Place, Woodinville, Cascade. |
Two, even if an enormous budget were available for the most spectacular effects imaginable, the timelier-than-ever Ray Bradbury short story upon which this movie is based might well have been brought to the screen far more persuasively in animation instead of live action.
Indeed, it’s possible to imagine “A Sound of Thunder” as a knockout Japanese anime.
The film in turn demonstrates two hard truths: First, despite all the experience, dedication and energy of Hyams and a team of Hollywood experts, the Czech Republic’s venerable Barrandov Studios, source of many a Czech film classic, is not up to creating world-class special effects.
And second, that for all his accomplishments, Ben Kingsley can be an insufferable, over-the-top ham without strong material and firm direction.
It’s 2055, and Kingsley’s Charles Hatton is the superrich proprietor of Chicago’s Time Safari company, which for an exorbitant fee offers a time-travel hunting expedition back 65 million years when dinosaurs ruled the Earth.
Leading the expeditions is Dr. Travis Ryer (Edward Burns), who believes that time travel will allow him to secure DNA in order to revive long-extinct species. (It also seems that sometime in the next half-century a virus will wipe out virtually all wild animals not in captivity.)
Apparently, Ryer’s responsibilities during the expeditions and his idealistic scientific passions so occupy his attention that he somehow manages to overlook what a ruthless huckster and greedy jerk Hatton is.
Hatton has managed to steal the technology developed by physicist Dr. Sonia Rand (Catherine McCormack) that makes the time travel possible, and she tries to sound the alarm that under Hatton’s control the technology inadvertently could trigger evolutionary catastrophe. The rules of the safaris are: Don’t change anything in the past, don’t leave anything behind; and above all, don’t bring anything back.
When a tiny object is brought back from a safari a series of “time waves” are triggered that wash over Chicago, re-creating evolution with increasing speed.
Virtually nothing in “A Sound of Thunder” is convincing, although Burns and McCormack deserve credit for their determination. The picture looks as murky as its story line, the sound is tinny, much of the dialogue is flat or confoundingly technical or merely risible, and most everything on the screen looks patently fake.
As a disaster movie, “A Sound of Thunder” really is a disaster.
Edward Burns stars in “A Sound of Thunder.”
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