I cannot recall clearly when I first read Ray
Bradbury’s short story A Sound of
Thunder. I can’t even remember in what
publication I found it. Originally published in 1952, it’s
possible that I read it in a 1983 anthology of short stories called
Dinosaur Tales. I simply can’t be sure. But
of all of Bradbury’s stories, that one has always stayed with
me. It’s a sly tale that would have made Rod Serling
proud. It’s a story of time travel gone terribly wrong, a
wonderful object lesson about causality and the fragile nature of
time. The story depicts the ultimate hunt, the kill
of one of the most fearsome creatures ever to walk the Earth, a
Tyrannosaurus Rex. Time Safari, Inc. is a private concern that
will, for a small fortune, send an intrepid hunter back in time to bag
the beast. Ever conscious of the risks of disrupting the
temporal flow, Time Safari preselects every animal to be killed.
Each would have died very shortly after the planned kill in a manner
that did not contribute to the historical record, so there should be
no disruption of time. Travelers are cautioned severely; the
story makes clear that the smallest change in the distant past could
magnify over the millions of intervening years to alter existence in
the present in unpredictable and potentially devastating ways.
Screenwriters Thomas Dean Donnelly, Joshua Oppenheimer, and Gregory
Poirier accepted the task of expanding Bradbury’s short
cautionary tale into a rousing two-hour action adventure. And in
the process came down with a fatal attack of Plot Deficit Disorder
(PDD).
It’s 2055. Charles Hatton (Ben Kingsley)
is the ambitious, self-promoting tycoon that runs Time Safari.
His personality is akin to the salesman who can sell a refrigerator to
the occupants of an igloo. And when he admits that his ambition
is to own everything, it’s not quite clear that he isn’t
serious. His time traveling team leader, the man who controls
the kill and has the responsibility to ensure that the temporal flow
is not disrupted, is Travis Ryer (Edward Burns). He’s not
in the game for fame or riches; he’s a zoologist dedicated to
recovering the genetic material required to clone the Earth’s
animal life, recently wiped out by a mysterious virus.
He’s developed a mechanism to remotely collect genetic sequences
but requires multiple trips to complete.
(How collecting
prehistoric gene sequences from an Allosaurus will help reconstruct a
lion is never made clear. And wouldn’t it have been easier
to travel fifty years into the past to capture animals, draw blood for
genetic material, release them, and return to the present to clone the
biodiversity back into existence?)
To establish the
film’s fundamental premise, we’re thrust immediately into
a hunting trip, a leap of sixty-five million years into the Cretaceous
to assassinate an Allosaurus just as it’s become hopelessly
bogged down in a tar pit. It’s a thrilling and triumphant
adventure celebrated with a congratulatory bottle of Champagne
provided by host Hatton after the party’s return to Time
Safari. And it’s then that we’re given our first
warning that these trips risk destroying existence as we know
it. Sonia Rand (Catherine McCormack), a former employee
responsible for the development of the time machine’s system
software, manages to get through security and sprays the clients with
a blood-like fluid while screaming dire warnings.
(Why she
continued to work to completion with the knowledge that it is a very
bad idea is not made clear.)
Unceremoniously kicked out of
the building, she’s piqued Ryer’s curiosity. He
rushes after her for a little necessary exposition about the risks of
time travel. But for Hatton, it’s business as usual.
And as we join the next pair of brave travelers and the Time Safari
team for the next hunt, the first major symptom of PDD rears
its ugly head. They do not travel to another time and place to
kill another animal that is about to die. They travel to
precisely the same time and precisely the same location to kill
precisely the same animal. Why do they not encounter themselves
on another safari? It was at this point that I realized that the
film and the viewer are in trouble.
It will take one more
time journey to destroy the fabric of time. The DVD’s
keepcase telegraphs the problem: a butterfly. Someone tramples
on the prehistoric insect, tipping over the first domino in an
unbelievable long chain of tiles. Perhaps one of that
butterfly’s offspring would be a mutation that would become a
new food source for an animal that would itself become the food source
for a higher life form that would . . . I think you get the idea.
When the travelers return to the present, at first all seems
quite normal. But soon “time waves” sweep over the
planet, and every time they do, aspects of our existence change.
Eventually, lethal plants, copious insects, and carnivorous creatures
that seem to have tapped into the genes of Baboons and Velociraptors
begin to dominate our world. And utterly without credibility,
humans are saved for a later time wave before they change into
something else. Our existence is coming to an end.
(Time waves are another nonsensical cinematic construct. If
your enemy traveled back in time to put a bullet into your pre-teen
grandfather’s head, you would blink out of existence
instantaneously. You would not find yourself swept away by a
time wave moments or hours or days later. And why do time waves
pick up and throw heavy objects around as would a vast tsunami?)
It falls to Rand and Ryer to restore time, reverse the effects
of the contamination, and to prevent any additional trips into the
past. Alas, I found myself repeatedly shaking my head in
disbelief as one illogical writing blunder after another was depicted
onscreen. They are simply too numerous to list. The only
seemingly close-to-clever aspect of the film is the means used by Ryer
to overcome the paradox of a successful restoration of the time
obliterating his memory in the present and eliminating the motivation
to go back in time to put things right. But here, too, the
screenwriters fail. Conveniently embracing an inconsistent
concept of causality, the screenwriters hint that once the timeline is
resurrected, the entire motivation for returning to the past to
correct it vanishes. But they ignore the simple reality that it
doesn’t matter how you correct the rip in the fabric of
time. Once the motivation vanishes, the evidence to prevent
future trips also vanishes. So there is no fixing that fatal
error. We are left to make the same mistake over and over again,
until a hero fails to resurrect existence and the world remains
undone, time and history forever altered.
The
players make an earnest effort to overcome the deficiencies of the
writing. Peter Hyams’s direction is faultless, creating
lovely visual and aural feasts. I enjoyed the production design
and the look of the film. But the special effects are not quite
as good as we’ve come to expect. Several give themselves
away. But those discussions are moot. The overwhelming
problems with the screenplay are that it fails to retain self-
consistency and fails to pay the slightest attention to causality.
Time travel plotlines are arguably the most difficult to
construct. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
handled the paradoxes nicely. And despite the small lapses due
to the humor and tongue-in-cheek nature of the Back to the
Future series, even those three films treated time with more
respect. A Sound of Thunder constantly disrupted my
willing suspension of disbelief. I haven’t had such a
disruptive experience since I reviewed The Core.
The Video: How Does The Disc Look?
The
film’s theatrical aspect ratio of 2.35:1 is presented in
anamorphic video. Whatever I may have thought of the screenplay,
this is a lovely transfer. Virtually halo-free, small object
detail and finely grained textures are first-rate. Chroma noise
is nonexistent. Color accuracy based on natural skin tones is
excellent. Shadow detail in the many night scenes is
terrific. I didn’t notice any macroblocking or mosquito
noise. Perhaps it’s the absence of any bit-consuming
supplements that afforded a higher bit-budget for the film.
Perhaps all the digital effects in the film facilitated a direct
digital transfer. Whatever the cause, the transfer is very good
indeed.
The Audio: How Does The Disc Sound?
The same can be said of the Dolby Digital 5.1
track. I was particularly impressed with the depth and strength
of the bottom end. My solar plexus was absolutely pummeled by
thunder, explosions, and the ridiculously seismic footsteps of a
prehistoric beast. The surrounds are very active, immersing the
viewer in a maelstrom of sound enhanced with EX decoding. You
will not walk away from this film humming any complex themes by score
composer Nick Glennie-Smith; the score was written exclusively to
punctuate onscreen action. Regardless, the orchestra is
presented with pleasing fidelity. The sound effects, like the
blasts from the frozen nitrogen bullet firing rifles, have a nice
attack time and dynamic range. The only fault I found was a bit
of compression distortion in some of the dialog.
There are no alternate languages. Optional subtitles are in
French, Spanish, and English, for which Closed Captions are also
included.
Supplements: What Goodies Are There?
The only two extras are a pair of trailers (1:55 and
0:55, respectively) shown in respectable anamorphic video. The
filmmakers couldn’t even be self-consistent in the
trailers. The film is set in 2055. The first trailer
places the action in 2054. Sigh.
The 110-minute film
is organized into twenty-seven chapters.
Exclusive
DVD-ROM Features: What happens when you pop the disc into your PC?
There are no DVD-ROM features on this DVD.
Final Thoughts
There is action, there is
adventure, there is a solid science fiction concept, and there is an
inept execution. An essentially supplement-free DVD with a
commendable presentation, I must warn you that if your suspension of
disbelief is fragile or if you don’t have the ability to leave
your brain at the door, this may not be the film for you.
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