Man Discovers Time Travel, Uses It To Kill Dinosaurs - 'A Sound of Thunder' Review...

Posted on September 2, 2005 - 3:56pm by michael I have an undying love of time travel movies, I think it's one of the single most interesting premises ever applied to motion pictures, so I have an unusually high tolerance for ridiculousness in time travel movies. I was pretty thoroughly interested in A Sound of Thunder for about the first half an hour or so until I realized that it has absolutely no understanding of how time travel paradoxes work.

The movie takes place in the year 2055, and a woman named Sonia Rand has developed a time machine that can take hunters back to the time of the dinosaurs where, for an enormous price, they can hunt real dinosaurs. They open a business called Time Safari, which just seems to be to be thickly shrouded in bad ideas, and all manner of super-rich hunters show up to try out the futuristic and highly imperfect technology.

Of course, no one has ever travelled through time, so all we know about what would happen if you travelled to the distant past and changed something is necessarily theoretical, but the minor application of simple logic suggests that if you travel to the Cretaceous period and start killing off Tyrannosaurs, you're going to cause all manner of unknown changes for the next several million years with an unknown effect on modern times.

I don't put a lot of stock into chaos theory - the idea that a mosquito flapping its wing in southeast Asia will set in motion a chain reaction of events that will culminate in a hurricane battering the American south, but I do remember seeing a Simpsons episode where Homer was travelling back and forth to the time of the dinosaurs and making little mistakes which resulted in huge changes when he got back to Springfield, and that whole idea just seems prety sensible to me.

Not in this movie. Here, all the changes take place gradually, in "time waves," which are basically just astonishingly bad CGI tidal waves, as though Father Time is only gradually beginning to realize that someone has tricked him and sends out memos that radiate out from the center of, ah, time, I guess.

You see, each wave changes different things, animals, plants, weather, etc, leaving everything else temporarily unaffected. And of course, the humans will be changed by the last wave, so that they can watch all of the other changes taking place while they wonder what will happen to them. Luckily, one of the characters in the movie is an expert who somehow knows how all of this stuff works, so we get a tour guide of the freaky events taking place. Nice.

There is one scene where a time wave bowls through the world, reducing an entire city to a post-apocalyptic world, a cheap version of the New York City from I Am Legend. After the first wave passes through, the two main characters are standing near an overturned vehicle, where a crowd of people have gathered and are all crowded around the vehicle, evidently more interested in the fact that it's on its side than that their entire city has instantly reached an advanced state of decay. Mayeb these were the same underpaid and under-directed extras that crowded around the head of the Statue of Liberty in Cloverfield like it was the office water cooler.

Things start to get complicated when Travis Ryer (an uninspired performance by Edward Burns) tries to go back and stop the first crew from making the first change, but this time, instead of the computer missing the landing site by five minutes like in a previous mission, she misses by tens of millions of years, sending Ryer into the old west, right in front of another time wave. Something tells me this technology just wasn't quite ready for public comsumption yet.

And how do they manage to keep going back to the same point in time? Well you see, the computer, Tammie, I think they called her, is programmed to send them there. The physics and calculations involved in doing that are not explained, but obviously to attempt such an explanation would be confusing and meaningless, and the movie is not smart enough to attempt such a thing anyway.

It was about 35 minutes into the film that I knew it was going to be pretty disastrously bad, that there was going to be no redeeming turnaround where it would get better in the second half. Of course, movies like this almost never do that. The reason to keep watching is to see what kind of things they come up with, even if they are badly animated. Most of all, I wanted to see what changes would happen to the humans.

We never do, of course. That would be too complicated for cartoonish special effects like this. All we see are some bizarre gorilla dinosaurs, and luckily Ryers happens to know their "only weakness."

Time travel is endlessly fascinating to me, but sadly, this one goes down as a boring failure.

The Bean Meter

[caption id="attachment_21453" align="aligncenter" width="110" caption="1.5 Beans out of 5."][/caption]