“What’s the point of being rich if you can’t buy things other people can’t afford?”
In 2055, “Time Safari Inc.”, owned by Charles Hatton (Ben Kingsley), offers a unique and controversial vacation experience. Through the invention of a device that allows people to go back in time, they can hunt down and kill extinct animals from the past. This sophisticated technology is used to entertain rich entitled jerks. Hatton charges thousands of dollars each for the experience.
The computer that runs the program is called TAMI, "Time Alteration Manipulator Interface". The original builder of the machine was Sonia Rand (Catherine McCormack). The current brains of the operation is Travis Ryer (Edward Burns). He also guides the safaris that take customers back in time. The crew with him includes Jenny Krase (Jemima Rooper) and Marcus Payne (David Oyelowo). The team is aware that if they alter anything in the past it may change the outcome of the future. To make sure that doesn’t happen, the time jump takes the hunting party back 65 million years where the hunters shoot a T-Rex just before the animal is stuck in a tar pit, and moments before a volcano begins to erupt.
Before one of the jumps an accident occurs that causes the guns used in the hunt to malfunction. The ensuing panic results in a footprint being left behind. The footprint was caused by one of the hunters stepping off of the designated pathway and crushing a butterfly. The dead butterfly comes back in time with the hunter, but due to a cost saving short cut in the safety protocols, the butterfly is not detected. The event creates a rift that alters the future. The changes in the time line happen in waves and not all at once. Travis reaches out to Sonia for help in figuring out what happened and if there is a way to fix it. With the time waves continuing to come, they are running out of time. The mistake in the past must be fixed before humanity disappears all together.
“A Sound of Thunder” was released in 2005 and was directed by Peter Hyams. It is a science fiction horror thriller based on the 1952 short story by Ray Bradbury. The film was a co-production amid the U.S., the UK, Germany and the Czech Republic.
The movie got a lot of bad reviews. I liked it, but I’ve seen a lot of crap lately so maybe I’m not the best judge what’s good or bad anymore. Still, we are talking about a Ray Bradbury story so the plot is solid and intriguing. Production went through a whole bunch of crap that delayed the film from being released for a couple years. The acting is decent and Ben Kingsley is wonderfully idiotic and campy. The main problem with the movie is the CGI. Granted the special effects are not what they should be but, once again folks, I’ve seen a lot worse.
My feelings are that most people who didn’t like the movie are a little jaded when it comes to special effects. They expect every movie to look like “Star Wars” or “Harry Potter”. That doesn’t happen. Between the film company going bankrupt while still in post-production and floods in the Czech Republic during production, I can cut the movie some slack, and I can sit back and enjoy what is there. It may be short on completed CGI, but it was still entertaining.