A Sound of Thunder - "It's the Brambles!"

I’m awful at procrastinating about writing my articles for this site, partly because I spend so much time watching movies for podcast episodes. I don’t mean podcasts that I do; I mean podcasts I listen to. I listen to How Did This Get Made?, With Gourley and Rust, Blank Check, and The Rewatchables. Typically, I watch the movie they cover so I can enjoy the episode. I’ve been active on Letterboxd this year, so I log all of these movies, but I’ve been considering just writing about these movies for my site, as well, even though I don’t own all of the movies covered. I’m just tired of putting off writing while I watch all these movies and write up blurbs about them on Letterboxd. With this in mind, I started watching the latest movie HDTGM covered, A Sound of Thunder. It’s so fucking bad that I knew I had to write a full article about it. Its awfulness inspired me. So, here are my ramblings about this abomination. Hopefully, I keep myself motivated enough to also get my thoughts on The Batman and Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III on here in the next few days. We’ll see…

“A Sound of Thunder” is a classic short story by Ray Bradbury. I used to teach it to freshmen back when I was an English teacher. It’s a fairly simple sci-fi story: a company in the future has created time travel, which they use to take rich people back in time to kill extinct animals (in this case a dinosaur). The main rule is that hunters can’t leave the main path. Of course, someone does, and it changes things in the future (in the story, a fascist wins the presidency). 

It’s a surprisingly brutal little story about how little things, like killing a butterfly in the past, can lead to major consequences in the future. In the story, the hunter who messed up ends up getting shot for messing up the future (the titular sound of thunder is the gunshot that kills him). There is no plan to save the day, and we don’t get much evidence as to what has changed other than someone talking about the election and a sign that’s spelled differently. In other words, this isn’t exactly movie material. Of course, that’s never stopped anyone before.

The film version keeps the basic premise of the story, but adds a bunch of Jurassic Park and futuristic-type bullshit. Oh, and the bulk of the movie is about trying to go back and fix their mistake. I’m okay with that, I suppose, because you have to do something to flesh this story out. But they clearly didn’t have the budget for the action sequences and creature effects.

The green-screen work and creatures in this film are distractingly bad. If Ed Burns and Ben Kingsley knew what this film was eventually going to look like, I can’t imagine they would have still signed on (but then again…money). Some of this silly movie might actually make some kind of sense, but I couldn’t pay much attention to the dialogue because of the awful CG in the background of some scenes. 

From what I kind of gathered, someone stepping off the path created a series of time waves. Every now and then, a time wave hits and evolution changes. It starts with plants, then bugs, then animals. The race against the clock is that our heroes must get back in time and fix the mistake before a time wave changes humans. Look, I know this is time travel, and logic should be left at the door, but this is too silly to take seriously, even if the movie looked good. If you went back millions of years and fucked shit up, when you get back everything will already be changed. It won’t happen in a series of “waves.” I feel confident in claiming that evolution is happening to all things at all times. It’s not like it’s just evolution time for trees right now, and in a few thousand years, the bugs will get their turn. 

The time waves were created to add suspense, but why go so crazy sci-fi with it? They clearly didn’t have the budget for this stuff, so why not keep it simple? Not to mention, someone stepping on a butterfly won’t stop the dinosaurs from going extinct. An asteroid was going to hit the earth rather that butterfly lived or not. Just stick with the original story. It doesn’t have to be a presidential election and grammar that changes, but it could just be the government oversight that changes. The bulk of the film could be Ed Burns seeing all the negative changes to the world, politically and otherwise, and then it could be about him going back in time again to fix things while the people at the company try to stop him. You could even get into him questioning if the changes are that bad, or maybe it was all actually meant to be, etc. You know, add some inner turmoil instead of a fucking dino-ape that he has to kill with an ice gun. 

The best way to sum up my feelings about the movie is this: as a film lover and slightly lazy teacher, I always looked for movie versions of the stuff I taught to supplement my lessons. When I looked this movie up, I didn’t even bother watching it because the description of it made it clear that it was not a very faithful adaptation (hell, the title no longer makes sense because no one gets shot at the end [yes, the hunter shoots himself in this one, but the story isn’t told from his perspective so there’s no “sound of thunder” moment for him like there is in the story]). So rather than even watch this piece of shit to confirm my suspicions, I decided to have my students watch the segment from a “Treehouse of Horror” episode of The Simpsons that lampoons the story. I suggest you do the same before you waste your time with this abomination. And I’m keeping that time pun at the end because even that piece of weak ass writing is better than anything in A Sound of Thunder.

Random Thoughts / Favorite Quotes

This is the same director as Timecop, so why does it look worse than that even though this was made a decade later?

This guy, Peter Hyams, also directed Enemies Closer and Sudden Death. Maybe if they had cast Van Damme in this it would have been better. He would definitely had been cheaper than Ed Burns at the time, so they would have extra money to fix the effects, at least.

IMDb claims they ran out of money, and that is painfully clear. The green screen stuff is distractingly bad. Why film so many walk and talks outside when you don’t have the money to make a realistic background for those scenes? There is a lot of exposition that happens in these street scenes, but I couldn’t focus on any of it because I couldn’t look away from the worse-than-a-PS2-videogame-cutscene effects going on in the background.

I guess all the money went to Ed Burns and Ben Kingsley…and Ben Kingsley’s hilarious wig.

This is a decade after Jurassic Park and that dinosaur at the beginning looks fucking plastic.

I can’t stress this enough: these special effects are so bad this movie should not have been released.

Ed Burns has two Chicago Cubs World Series pennants on his wall (this was made before the Cubs won in 2016 and the idea of them ever winning was still so ludicrous it could only show up in sci-fi films) for the years 2046 and 2022. Could this film predict this year’s World Series? As a Cardinals fan, that will make having watched this a doubly excruciating experience.

Good call by Peter Hyams to start shaking the camera like a lunatic during that volcano sequence. Otherwise, it would have looked as stupid as the earlier dinosaur scenes. Still looked like shit, though.

So a woman gets killed by a bunch of bugs and stands straight up the whole time? How exactly did bugs kill the lady, anyway? What the fuck is happening in this stupid movie?

This fucking movie has dino-apes.

For a movie with dinosaurs, dino-apes, and time travel, people tell each other to “Calm down” way too often.

This movie doesn’t deserve the effort David Oyelowo gave in that death scene.

“It’s the brambles. These people went crazy and killed each other.”

“That piece of crap safari. I haven’t felt right since!”

“Drop the gun, I don’t want to shoot you.”

“Why not? I want to shoot you.”

These dipshits didn’t have enough money for ANY special effects, yet they made a movie that calls for dinosaurs and futuristic shit. On top of that, they decide that a CG “time wave” should exist to show that time is changing throughout the film. Why add more special effects when you can’t afford any at all? Just make the room shake or something and say it’s a “time quake,” you stupid fucking dildos.

I don’t laugh out loud very often when I watch movies alone, but when Murron from Braveheart gets turned into a catfish-human hybrid, I burst out laughing. She even (side) blinks at the camera, as if to say, “Can you believe this shit?”