Director-cinematographer Peter Hyams’s ambitious but largely disappointing A Sound of Thunder suggests two things:

One, that a large-scale sci-fi disaster movie must have state-of-the-art special effects to have a prayer of succeeding;

Two, even if an enormous budget were available for the most spectacular effects imaginable, the timelier-than-ever Ray Bradbury short upon which this movie is based might well have been brought to the screen far more persuasively in animation instead of live action. Indeed, it’s possible to imagine A Sound of Thunder as a knockout Japanese anim�.

It’s 2055, and Ben Kingsley’s Charles Hatton is the super-rich proprietor of Chicago’s Time Safari company, which for an exorbitant fee, offers a time-travel hunting expedition back 65 million years when dinosaurs ruled the Earth.

Leading the expeditions is Dr Travis Ryer (Edward Burns), who believes that time travel will allow him to secure DNA to revive long-extinct species.

It also seems that sometime in the next half-century a virus will wipe out virtually all wild animals not in captivity.

Apparently, Ryer’s responsibilities and his idealistic scientific passions so occupy his attention that he manages to overlook what a ruthless huckster and greedy jerk Hatton is. Very little is convincing, the dialogue is flat and the screen looks patently fake.

Source: Cape Times