A Sound of Thunder<\/i> is Peter Hyams’ 2005 film version of Ray Bradbury’s 1953 time travel story of the same name.<\/p>\n
We rented the movie because my husband was in the mood for an entertainingly bad movie (sometimes, you just want cheese, you know?). It was indeed fairly entertaining, and not quite<\/i> as bad as we’d been led to believe.<\/p>\n
It has two major problems:<\/p>\n
1. The lead actor, Ed Burns, displays one of two facial expressions (“blank” and “vaguely annoyed”) throughout the entire film. Case in point: when a character with whom his character has a close, brother\/sister type relationship gets killed horribly — he looks blank, then vaguely annoyed.<\/p>\n
2. It was clearly intended as an eye-candy FX film — and the effects looked really unfinished. The movie was heavily CGI-based, and almost all the CGI needed another rendering pass or two before it would be ready for audiences. <\/p>\n
Apparently, the movie ran over budget in post-production, and the studio refused to front the money for proper completion. They shelved the almost-finished film for a couple of years, then dumped it in theaters.<\/p>\n
While parts of it run like a checklist of action movie cliches, Thunder<\/i> is really no dumber than other big loud skiffy films like The Day After Tomorrow<\/i>, The Core<\/i>, or Paycheck<\/i>, and it does have some fairly witty dialog in places. And Ben Kingsley is fun to watch.<\/p>\n
While I agree that Ray Bradbury’s work deserves a better treatment, even with the underbaked FX and sleepwalking star, I think most science fiction fans would find this a more enjoyable movie than, say, Elektra<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"