Time out

Noel Vera

The official line is that Peter Hyams' "A Sound of Thunder," his
Hollywood adaptation of the short story by famed writer Ray
Bradbury, is a travesty of a minor science fiction classic.

Wrong on several counts. First, Bradbury is famous, but reading his
stuff nowadays you can't help but think that his prose, his somewhat
limited range of subject matter, and the emotional tone of much of
his work is, well, rather precious. He constantly strives for poetic
effects and achieves them, but doesn't quite know when to quit; the
ultimate result is often a touch overdone, if not downright purple.
He's written on everything from horror to censorship to the conquest
of Mars, but when he's not dealing with extremes of emotion--intense
rapture or outright terror--he doesn't know what to do (he seems
more comfortable with either rapture or terror). As for human
relationships, I'd say the sticky "A Story of Love" neatly
summarizes his views: love is a schoolboy's crush on his teacher,
chaste yet embarrassingly florid, fulfilled only by a twist of fate
(or perhaps reincarnation).

Bradbury is a writer more fit for adolescents than for sophisticated
tastes; "A Sound of Thunder" is one of his better works, I'd say,
mainly because it's a short story (Bradbury is better in small
doses), a straightforward science-fiction horror piece, and a
cautionary tale (funny how "science fiction," "cautionary"
and "horror" almost always go hand-in-hand-in-hand). It provokes
basic feelings, which is what the author intended, and with minimum
sentiment. I wouldn't call it a classic, though, and I wouldn't say
Hyams' movie trashes it; if anything, he honors his source material
by keeping the digital effects low-budget (relatively speaking, for
a Hollywood production), and whipping the material along as fast as
possible. The actors toss pages of pseudoscientific gibberish (time
waves that affect creatures according to their level of evolution?)
over their shoulders quickly and casually, which is the only way one
can take any of this seriously (Actually, the perfect director would
have been Larry Cohen, who can give the picture an appropriately low-
budget look and feel, tossing in half a dozen other more intriguing
ideas along the way--but Cohen doesn't seem to be fond of Bradbury's
type of hyperdramatic, simpleminded fiction).

For those who have never read Bradbury's story: it's the future,
time travel has been invented, and all man can think to do with this
tremendous scientific achievement is to make a quick buck selling
safaris to the past, where rich men for a hefty fee can go and shoot
dinosaurs. An accident causes one of the guns to jam, and the prey,
an Allosaurus (Why not the larger and better-known T-Rex? Hyams
could have departed that much from Bradbury) comes closer than the
hunters would have liked. When they return, things have changed; one
of them has somehow altered the past, and it's affecting the present
in waves, causing trees to sprout out of city streets, and strange
animals--reptilian yet intelligent, descendants of dinosaurs given
an extra hundred and sixty-five million years to evolve--to emerge
and prey on the helpless humans. This, of course, according to
relative newcomers' Thomas Dean Donnelly and Joshua Oppenheimer's
screenplay (with polish apparently provided by veteran comedy writer
Gregory Poirier); Bradbury's story proposed a simpler (and more
chillingly prophetic, I'd say) consequence--it's election time, and
the people have voted for the more fascist leader.

Hyams strains too hard to give us action-thriller setpieces: the
time travelers cross the city's central park to find out who had
caused the changes (as if it really mattered at this point), move on
when they have the wrong man, then walk further to transfer a
portable hard disk to a working computer (technology!)--all just the
merest of excuses to expose the travelers to the new world's more
predatory fauna. Far better are Hyams' (who started out as a
cinematographer) attempts at the odd haunting image: a band of
creatures gathering slowly round their crippled prey; a monstrous
face retreating into the shadows, eyes glittering; hundreds of the
same creatures (they're the picture's single best invention, and
Hyams makes the most of them) hanging from the ceiling, fast
asleep. "A Sound of Thunder" is the second of Hyams' forays into
time travel (the first was the clumsy Jean-Claude Van Damme
actioner "Timecop"), and by far his most ambitious, if not most
effective, work of science fiction (maybe his best was the paranoia-
inducing "Capricorn One," where the United States government fakes a
landing on Mars).

It's all a silly genre exercise, made bearable by a sparse handful
of one-liners ("Where can we find another computer terminal?" "How
about Home Depot?"), by the aforementioned images, and by the
aforementioned monsters. Ben Kingsley helps matters somewhat by
playing a fast-talking entrepreneur who uses his Gandhi-like charm
to calm frightened clients and sweet-talk government inspectors, all
while wearing a hairpiece from the planet Metaluna (it looks as if
someone had slapped whitewash on his scalp and just kept going).
Catherine McCormack proves less useful, lending her tall athletic
frame and lilting English accent to the picture, and little else.
Edward Burns, to put it kindly, is a hole in the screen: a dull
filmmaker ("The Brothers McMullen," "She's the One") and even duller
actor ("Saving Private Ryan"), he pretty much walks (or rather,
jogs) through the length of the movie without even looking worried,
much less involved in what's happening (he's as unflappable as Sean
Connery in the James Bond flicks, only Connery made it look fun).
Still, if you can stand the cheap digital effects, wooden acting
(mainly by Burns) and endless running about, "A Sound of Thunder" is
actually a tad better than it sounds.

(First published in Businessworld, 9/16/05)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)