A Sound of Thunder (Widescreen Edition) (2005) Starring Armin Rohde, Heike Makatsch, Jemima Rooper, David Oyelowo, Wilfried Hochholdinger, 102 minutes,
4.4/10 (89 votes)
About the Movie: A Sound of Thunder earns itself a special place in the hearts of understanding sci-fi movie fans. It's an ambitious yet ultimately cheesy techno-adventure, and genre buffs won't be surprised that it was directed by Peter Hyams, the once-promising sci-fi specialist (c'mon, 2010 wasn't so bad) who delivers glorified B movies like The Relic every few years or so. (After several release-date postponements it was eventually dumped into theaters in late summer 2005.) This poorly written but otherwise sensible end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenario borrows its premise from a classic Ray Bradbury short story which warned about the catastrophic consequences of traveling backwards in time and accidentally altering the course of the future (and in this case, the entire course of evolution on Earth). It's the year 2055, and Travis (Ed Burns) leads the "Time Safari" team financed by a greedy corporate shark (Ben Kingsley), and time-machine inventor Sonia (Catherine McCormack) gets involved when a hapless time-tourist sends the future into a cataclysmic state of evolutionary disarray, turning Chicago into a feeding ground for ravenous baboon-o-sauruses, pterodactyl-sized vampire bats, man-eating sewer serpents and other hybrid by-products of temporal disruption. The special effects are cheap-looking and the time-travel scenario is a bit rickety, but somehow A Sound of Thunder remains surprisingly entertaining as an alternative to over-hyped blockbusters. And hey... it's better than 2003's Timeline, so cut it some slack, OK? --Jeff Shannon
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