Since we’ve looked at a LOT of low-to-no budget dinosaur films this year (maybe even more than usual), let’s end with something that actually released in most english-speaking cinemas, had some actual movie studios and actually known industry faces attached to it, with A Sound Of Thunder.
Based on a short story of the same name by Ray Bradbury and set in the still “distant” future of 2055, it tells the story of a company, Time Safari, that offers to rich customers the possibility to travel back in time and hunt dinosaurs.
Due to the huge risks involved with the “space-time fabric and whatnot”, the company regulates the safari by hunting species of dinosaurs that would have eventually died anyway of natural causes and keeps the clients from stepping off the designated path of the safari experience.
While on a hunt, a gun malfunctions, forcing the team to scatter and flee from an Allosaurus, and even if they eventually regroup, when they come back to their time with no harm done… they soon find out their actions had consequences, like a sudden increase in global temperature and the over-night instant, abudant growth of plant life, with further trips resulting in even more messing with the space-time continuum and endangering the existence of humanity as a whole…
It also had a tie-in GBA game that was received better, which is intriguing for retrogamers (especially GBA buffs like me) since it was not a movie backed by big studios, so it’s incredible it got a tie-in game at all, but kinda sad, even more since the movie was both panned and a box office bomb, never making back its budget even internationally, not even close.
And i will say, it’s not a bad idea, and we still haven’t many dinosaur movies that involve time travel, let alone ones that flirt with the “butterfly effect/chaos theory” idea, which Brabdury’s original short story did popularize in fiction.
Honestly i don’t get the mauling this movie did, what the hell did people expect from a movie that suffered heavy production woes, like at one point there was simply no money to finish the frigging movie, stat, it coming from an ensemble of mid-to-small companies that were most likely unknown to many movie goers, though the cast was far from being bad or devoid of well known names, with Ben Kingsley, Catherine McCormack, Edward Burns…
i mean, this was originally going to be directed by Renny Harlin (of the Nightmare In Elm Street sequels’ fame) and to star Pierce Brosnan, but then again, it wasn’t supposed to release in 2005, so yeah, as it’s often the case, the process it’s a fuckin mess.
Though, the cricitisms about some of the special effects were legit, i mean, the futuristic cities scenes are a laugh riot because they figured “its’ the future, so CG” meaning we get actors that are supposed to be moving through the city clearly walking on a treadmill over a green screen.
While i know some of these unfortunate choices or cost cutting decisions (like the movie eventually being filmed in the Czech Republic, an old trick to save a lot of buckaroos for smaller companies, but even that had issues due to the floods in Prague around 2002) were due to the main company financing/producing the film, Franchise Pictures, going bankrupt during post-production, i do believe in the case of “treadmill promenade” it would have simply been both cheaper and better looking to NOT use the now super clunky looking CG and just shoot it in real locations.
Because damn even the backdrops can look like cheap videogame jpegs at times, and while some effects are MILES better than others, when they are bad, they’re BAD.
Or the obvious CG “future cars”, which aren’t THAT horrendous to look at… in the first scene they appear, after that they do are distractingly out of place, i mean, stuff that should look worse or fake like the “hologram lion” it’s a LOT more believable than some of the overly “computerized” scenes like the one mentioned before. You can just tell when the budget factually run out in certain cases.
The dinosaur effects are okay, heck, in retrospect they’re FAR better than the usual fare, considering this was also on the cheaper side of thing, compared to big budget productions, though there’s the small but not so small critique to be made about the dinosaurs, though i shouldn’t use the plural, though you get to see some other weird creatures, so you might argue it evens out.
The acting was also criticized, but honestly i love Ben Kingsley playing a villanous greedy villain, a fun kind of villain, the best damn performance in the movie, hands down, and a good reason to make you stick with the film, though most of the cast performances are solid, a bit over the top, admittely, and to be fair Edward Burns performance as the lead scientist/character isn’t amazing, just not sure about the casting choice, but then again, it was originally supposed to be Pierce Brosnan in the role, and we already discussed how much troubles this movie had for everything.
Overall, despite some of the effects being very inconsistent in quality, some with really bad, obvious and distracting at times cheap CG usage that can actually be explained as “they ran out of fund half-way through” (because they did run of funds in post), and the performances being also quite uneven in quality (despite being overall very decent even from the lesser known actors), A Sound Of Thunder it’s a decently directed film by Peter Hyams i quite enjoyed despite its flaws and a script that runs on some choppy logic (and some scientific unaccuracies, apparently), and the idea-concept of the chaos theory applied to dinosaurs it’s still quite good, to the point i’d say we honestly could use a remake with a big budget and to do better justice to Bradbury’s short story.
I mean, if the industry it’s gonna keep remaking the same fuckin movies, might as well remake/redo a story like this that could actually benefit from an update, a better script or simply another shot at finding its audience, another chance if you will, because sure as hell it didn’t got much of one back in 2005, not helped by a complete lack of promotion due to the already discussed budget woes.
Definitely worth a revaluation after almost 20 years of mostly unfair bashing, i’d say.
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