Friday, September 02, 2005

Because sometimes, people just need to be warned

A Sound of Thunder is going to be in the next group of reviews I do ("Big & Loud"), but sometimes you see something so astonishingly awful, you feel the need to warn people. Such is the case with this bit of rubbish, supposedly costing $80M (though you'll never see it on screen) and being held back for a year and a half - which I don't get; a movie with awful effects isn't going to look more charming by delaying it so that the audience has already seen Sky Captain, Revenge of the Sith, and War of the Worlds beforehand.

So avoid this piece of junk. But don't hold it against Ray Bradbury. He's one of the greats, and deserves much better.

A Sound of Thunder

* (out of four)
Seen 31 August 2005 at Loews Boston Common #14 (preview)

A Sound of Thunder is a deeply stupid movie. It is the kind of stupid where an educated man holds a spherical object in his hand and calls it a "disc". It's also cheap-looking - I swear the computer model the special effects used for the allosaurus was Toy Story's Rex - but I might be able to forgive that, if not for the stupidity. The people who wrote the screenplay seemed to have learned everything they know about causality, biology, and physics from watching Star Trek (the bad years). It's the kind of movie where particle accelerators have chairs inside. It's the type of movie that forces anyone talking about it to make up words like "gorillasaur".

Right now, a certain portion of the people reading this review are thinking something along the lines of "gorillasaur... I am so there!" I can't stop the people whoo have that sort of instinctive reaction; I admit, I might have a hard time resisting it myself. I can only remind you that Ray Bradbury's original story didn't include such beasts, and a group of writers that includes a man whose credits include a fair amount of porn written under the name "Hugh Jorgan" is unlikely to have improved upon the work of one of the twentieth century's most celebrated writers. Not that it takes such an obvious group of hacks to butcher a classic story; Robert Silverberg, a respected author in his own right, took much the same route when expanding three classic stories by Isaac Asimov to novel length.

Read the rest at HBS.

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