While perusing one of my usual geek sites, I came across an article listing off a selection of unfinished films that were dumped into the market before they were 100% complete, for whatever reason.
In among the handful of titles was this one.
As I was reading what the article’s author had to say, I was trying to recall whether or not I’d actually seen this flick. Scouring my grey matter, the only thing I could effectively recall was something about incomplete CG but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember if, at one point or another, I’d actually sat down for this one’s 110-minute run-time.
So, while I was just recently on another of my weekend thrift store adventures, I stumbled upon a DVD copy of this one for $4. The coincidental timing of the find convinced me to shell out that hard earned few bucks and finally rectify the ‘have I or haven’t I seen it before’ question that was feverishly eating away at me.
Feverishly, I tell you.
Well, it seems that I HAD seen this one, roughly two decades ago (no doubt during one of my MANY stints as a lowly Video Store Clerk *sigh*) but for reasons we’ll explore below, my puny lil brain had essentially blocked all memory of it.
And with good reason.
A Sound of Thunder is loosely based on a story by renowned science fiction author Ray Bradbury and this shockingly misguided attempt at an adaptation was helmed by the normally reliable Peter Hyams (Outland).
Taking place in 2055, a massive tech corporation has developed a form of time-travel and is now offering time safaris for the ultra-rich, giving the clients the ability to hunt prehistoric animals for bragging rights or some such shit. Well surprise surprise…something goes wrong and soon time begins glitching, causing all manner of extinct and terrifying flora and fauna to invade the modern early-Sega generated world. And of course, it all becomes a race for survival as our zeros…I mean…heroes face off against an increasingly deadly series of scenarios.
I thought I was prepared.
But boy howdy shit…this one is something else!
The fact that A) Warner Bros settled on THIS version for wide release (!), and B) director Hyams opted to keep his name attached to this half-baked trash, utterly baffles me (unless due to contractual obligation of some kind). He should’ve just take the loss and ‘Smithee’d that shit. Avoid soiling his admittedly impressive filmography with this clearly not-meant-to-be fecal stain of a ‘movie’…if I can even call it that.
SO, on a night when my Better Half was out of town on business, knowing that the impending cinematic garbage would NOT be her cup of tea, no matter what her mind-set may be, cheerfully chemically-altered or otherwise, I grabbed my pad and pen, mixed up a vodka-7, had a solid pull off the vape hooter, and hit Play…
Scribbles ensued.
–Unintentionally hilarious opening scene. Sets the cartoonish tone. And it begins. As the flick kicks off, we are dumped into the middle of a prehistoric jungle setting where a group of people are exploring in silly space suits. With virtually no set-up, a carnivorous dinosaur turns up and get’s pew pew’d to death by the Super Soaker-looking guns these people are carrying. If you happen to remember the kids show ReBoot (1994), then you’ll have some idea about the quality of the CG that ended up onscreen here. Even for the mid ‘00’s, this laughable excuse for effects is actually rather shocking. But then again, since this flick did just get dumped into theatres incomplete, the writing was now on the wall for what to expect for the rest of it.
-Dialogue atrocious. From the very first lines uttered, this was hilariously bad. Stilted and forced, and not how actual humans interact. Like the piss poor CG, the writing was on the wall for the rest of the run-time.
-Poor Ben Kingsley. Pure exposition. Cartoonish performance. I’d forgotten that Sir Ben Kingsley, Best Actor Oscar Award winner in 1983 for his portrayal of ‘Gandhi’ in the film of the same name, was in this as the lizard-like CEO of the Time Safari company. He hams it right up and seems almost like he’s inwardly laughing at the role he found himself playing and, more importantly, getting paid for it. Also, damn near all dialogue that gets shat out here serves as nothing more than clumsy exposition. There’s no subtlety or imagination at work with the ‘characters’ and their interactions.
-Wow. Unfinished CG is unfinished. This is a constant here and this was one of the few bits that I DID remember from way back when. Oddly, some of the most distracting examples were simply people pretending to walk down city streets while Playstation 1-quality, blocky, texture-lacking CG vehicles zip by in the VERY obviously faked backgrounds. Added to which, the lighting on the foreground characters moving through these ‘environments’ never changes. No shadows. No light flares. Just flat studio lighting not actually affected by anything playing out in the scene, from any point around the ‘environment’. Amateur Hour bullshit is the name of the game here, which does suck for the artists who simply weren’t finished the work when the plug was pulled. But still.
-McCormack’s annoying. I’ve seen Catherine McCormack in a few different flicks, notably Braveheart (1995) and Spy Game (2001) and while she was fairly easy on the eyes, the characters she tends to play are irritating as hell. Not sure if that’s how they’re written or how she plays them but here was no different. I found her estranged tech inventor character grating as hell, especially her barky line deliveries, all snap and lunge, and I hoped she’d get killed by some chuckle-worthy CG beastie. Sadly, that hope went *SPOILER*…unanswered. The fact that there was absolutely no ‘chemistry’ with the main character, played by habitual wooden-plank actor Edward Burns (Saving Private Ryan), did not help things in any way, shape or form.
-All interactions feel phony. Dialogue awful. Acting sucks. Don’t think I need to expand on that one too much, now do I?
-Green screen atrocity. Flat, unresponsive lighting. More bitching about the seriously compromised effects scattered throughout this one. And I do mean ‘throughout’. I’d hoped to be able to hone in on the actual ‘movie’ parts around the laughable CG, but there is so much that is so inescapably bad that it’s an ongoing distraction.
-ALL dialogue expository. And shitty! More scribbles that don’t require elaboration.
-Hyams definitely off his game with this one. Peter Hyams has been a well-entrenched and capable director going back to the late 70’s, with titles like Outland (1981), 2010 (1984), Running Scared (1986), The Presidio (1988), Time Cop (1994) and The Relic (1997), among several others, standing out on his filmography. But here, this veteran director / cinematographer has completely shit the bed, and I do mean ‘completely’, most likely due to nefarious forces beyond his control; studio interference, cost over-runs etc. With those other successes kept in mind, it’s astounding that THIS one turned out as badly as it did. I guess sometimes some projects are just doomed from inception.
-Tone doesn’t know what it wants to be. Reminds of Supernova. From the get-go, this ‘movie’, as I scribbled above, doesn’t know what it wants to be. Straight up. Is it horror? Science Fiction? Comedy? Drama? For whatever reason, I was reminded of Walter Hill’s disastrous and also incomplete science fiction attempt, 2000’s Supernova…a flick so bad that Hill (Last Man Standing) wisely had his name removed and replaced with the ‘I Don’t Want Credit for this P.o.S.’ moniker ‘Alan Smithee’. Perhaps Hyams should’ve done the same.
-FX legit Pre-vis. Embarrassing. This is literally what the not-so-special effects are here. Pre visualizations that act as place holders for the final effects that will be locked down for the final prints once complete. Only…these were never completed and for whatever reason, when Warner Bros finally said ‘Fuck it…release the Thunder…in whatever form it’s in.’ this is what audiences got stuck with. Not a good look.
-I just might hate this ‘movie’. The cold hard fact that WB opted to shit THIS out into the world is borderline controversial, IMO. EVERYONE involved should be, and probably are, ashamed to their cores for partaking in this painful debacle, or at least for the end result their names are forever attached to. And painful it was! This seriously came across like something a film student with a bit of scratch and an iota of talent would fire out there as a demo reel. But nay, this is Peter fucking Hyams! Check out his resume. The dude is highly accomplished, over an impressively long period of time, yet somehow, EVERYTHING about this one fails. And I do mean everything. It all lands with a dull thud, in literally every scene, for a litany of reasons, sometimes several in the same scene. Yeesh.
-There is NO finesse. It’s a clumsy mess instead. The narrative is janky and awkwardly episodic, often with no ‘organic’ lead-up to individual scenes, leaving characters just doing…things, usually while delivering horribly obvious expository dialogue that mostly felt like rehearsal footage crammed in among the point-and-laugh worthy ‘effects’, if I’m so bold.
-Who approved this fucking script? That. Right there. I’m willing to hold cocaine at least somewhat responsible, but not for all of it.
-‘Spota’s Market’? Hyams’ trademark. If I recall correctly, the Greek name ‘Spota’ is always slipped into Hyams films as a tribute to his wife’s maiden name, which is admittedly sweet. Unfortunately, had he opted to have his director credit replaced with ‘Alan Smithee’, anyone familiar with this little tidbit of trivia would know right away. Busted! Guess he may have well just owned this turd, with that in mind.
–Narrative lurches along. Characters just do shit. As previously noted. This is a recurring theme in the haphazard, butchered structure.
-The ‘weapons’ are distractingly stupid-looking. I found myself wondering what it must’ve felt like to the core group of ‘actors’ who spend a bunch of time running around in front of horribly rendered backgrounds brandishing Toys-R-Us level ray-guns (that apparently pew pew ice bullets…sure, why not), that looked like they had no weight (because they probably didn’t), and somehow screamed a lack of imagination on the part of the Production Designers. Adults, serious actor-types, playing silly dress-up with spray-painted Super Soakers on some soundstage in Vancouver. I hope those WB paycheques were worth the indignity. Ouch.
-Death scenes are unearned and funny as hell. Like so much else in this pathetic piece of shit, character deaths just …happen, mostly for a cheap jump scare, the non-shock of which quickly degenerates into uproarious laughter as more late-90’s level CG carnage plays out. Also, being that none of the characters actually have ‘character’, I was actually rooting for them to violently expire, just to whittle down the ever-evolving Annoyance Factor. Too bad I felt like I was watching someone else play a videogame back in the day every time some attempt at large scale action was barely attempted. Funny and painful to behold, all at once.
-Bad. Just bad. Should’ve stayed on a shelf somewhere. Don’t need to add to that one, methinks.
All in all, there’s only one way I can honestly recommend this cinematic dumpster fire and that’s to embrace it as the weird dysfunctional waste-of-money-and-time curiosity of Hollywood that it is.
Even then, I do recommend you be fucked up on drugs and / or booze, as a block from the rot and slight scorching this maddeningly incompetent ‘product’ will leave on the ole grey matter upstairs. Also, pointing and laughing is encouraged. It’s a cringe-worthy wreck-show and proof that once in a while, even with all the resources and talent behind its attempted creation, sometimes a project just isn’t meant to happen, no matter the effort. That’s what this feels like…WB saw the budget, saw what they had, saw there was no salvaging it, shut down production in Post to save what pennies they could and just punted what was there into the 2005 season, wiping their hands of it and strolling away, legal obligations fulfilled, losses accepted. And should the movie-going public also stroll away, wiping their hands of it, inching it straight into Obscurity, perhaps this lackluster cinematic humiliation deserves such a fate, given it’s pop cultural uselessness and overall cringe-worthy presentation.
You want to see a prime example of Bad…this is it. Enjoy.
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