![]() ![]() Perfect special effects can have a cold detachment to them lousy ones can be eerie, strange, or fun. The scene where the giant brontosaurus attacks the travelers looks so precisely like actors standing in front of back projection that it scarcely improves on the original “King Kong.” In the first time-travel scene, as the travelers walk out of a wormhole and into a shimmering pathway, why do they all look in the same direction? Wouldn’t some of them look the other way? Why does the thick rain forest not have any trees in front of a volcano, so we can see it clearly? How can a volcano so far away that we can see all of it and yet be so close that its lava arrives in seconds? How can the lava look like dirty shaving cream and not like molten rock? How come if the power is out all over the city, the time machine can work? How can…īut what the hell, once you realize the effects are not even going to try to be convincing, you start to enjoy them. Meanwhile, in alternative realities, a futuristic Chicago becomes a tropical swamp inhabited by giant reptilian bats, saber-toothed eagles and lots and lots of bugs. The heart of the movie involves a series of desperate expeditions into the past to repair or prevent what went wrong, so that the familiar “present” will return. ![]() The heroine is Sonia Rand ( Catherine McCormack), who invented the computer that oversees the travel. The film’s hero is Travis ( Edward Burns), a scientist who hopes to recreate ancient DNA. Subtle dialogue hints suggest that maybe even the “safe” visits are making small changes, but then something happens big time, and the “present” is socked with a series of “time waves,” which look like an optical tsunami and leave a different world behind them. Since the same scenario is played out time and again, it raises the question of why each hunting party doesn’t run into the other ones. In theory this will not change the present because (a) frozen liquid nitrogen bullets are used, which will evaporate making no difference, (b) the targeted beast is selected because in another second it would have died anyway, and (c) the travelers never leave anything behind. In the movie, a greedy entrepreneur ( Ben Kingsley) charges millionaires a small fortune to travel back in time, kill a giant prehistoric reptile, and return with a video of themselves. In that it is firmly Darwinian, and indeed if the common ancestor of all primates had died without reproducing, where would that leave us? The movie is inspired by a famous short story by Ray Bradbury, arguing that to travel back in time and change even one tiny element in the past could completely alter the future. “A Sound of Thunder” may not be a success, but it loves its audience and wants us to have a great time.
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