A Sound of Thunder Reviews

After languishing for two years in the limbo of inexplicably unreleased projects, this "what if?" tale, based on Ray Bradbury's classic 1952 short story of the same title, lumbered into theaters and immediately established its credentials for the worst film of 2005. 2055, Chicago: Craven entrepreneur Charles Hatton (Ben Kingsley) has a lock on time-travel technology, which he uses to enrich himself by transporting mega-rich "hunters" back 65 million years so they can shoot the same poor allosaurus over and over again. By making sure the dinosaur dies at the moment it was destined to perish in a tar pit, Hatton and his right-hand man, studly scientist Dr. Travis Ryer (Edward Burns), ensure that history remains unaltered. That is, until the ill-fated expedition during which someone changes something — some apparently insignificant something that no one even noticed — and sent the course of evolution hurtling down a strange new path. Things at first appear normal when they return to the present, but within 24 hours the ripple effect generated by whatever they did has sent a "time wave" crashing through the millennia. Chicago is suddenly rife with malevolent vegetation and flesh-eating beetles, and as subsequent time waves fill the streets with rampaging baboonosauri and giant bat monsters, Ryer enlists the aid of physicist Dr. Sonia Rand (Catherine McCormack) to undo the damage before the human race is transformed into who-knows-what. In Bradbury's cautionary tale, the death of a prehistoric butterfly paves the way for an illiterate fascist world order. In Peter Hyams' dumbed-down movie, scripted by Thomas Dean Donnelly and Joshua Oppenheimer — whose subsequent achievements include the transformation of Clive Cussler's entertaining light adventure novel SAHARA (2005) into tedious drivel — the time travellers return to a new world of bogs and monsters, the better to facilitate silly chase scenes and unfortunate special effects. The profoundly unconvincing CGI work only makes the sorry screenplay and lackluster performances look worse.