MOVIES: Silencing The Sound of Thunder

One of the seemingly endless source of crappy movies these days are good skits on Saturday Night Live. The TV show generates MANY ideas worthy of five minutes, not so many when stretched to movie-length. It so pervasive, that it's like a neon sign blinking 'AVOID ME.'

Ray Bradbury wrote a masterful short story called The Sound of Thunder. It has been collected many times and I manage to read it about once every dozen years or so. I've seen two comic book adaptions that were first-rate, each time, the story being completely told in about 20 pages of art. The ending is always perfect, whether on the comic page, or in the mind's eye as you read the last paragraph of the short story.

So good is the story, that it's been made into a movie at least once before Peter Hyams came along and gave it another shot this summer. He's a director that mined the time travel field in a decent actioner called TimeCop and he also helmed one of my favourite SF movies of all time, Outland. Soooo, good source, good director, not to mention decent lead actors in Ben Kingsley and Ed Burns. Had to be worth shelling out the dollars to watch.

Not so much. No applause at the end of this stinker, just relief that it was time to slink out and try to forget the movie.

The problem in the movie is the padding. Hyams decides to introduce the artifice of time waves to have the changes wrought by the mistake that lies at the heart of the story, slowly over-take our time. BUUZZZZZZZ! Wrong! If the time travellers changed something back 65 million years ago, the meanie plants and animals would have evolved along side mankind and a wholly different architecture that's nowhere to be seen in the movie. If the time travellers brought something back from the time safari, then the bug, spores, virii or whatever would spring forth in epidemic fashion, but would not change the weather and cause earthquakes. In fact, none of that would have happened regardless of the time travellers missteps.

So, a great story turns into a creepy, poorly-written, CGI-enhanced Night Stalker story, replete with dino/mandrills and pterodactyl/vampire bats. Ugly. About the only saving grace was young actress Jemima Rooper, who's about to start a second series of the excellent British TV show, Hex. It's not that Rooper was any great shakes in this movie, it's just good to remember that Hex is coming back soon.