A Sound of Thunder

[Geekyfanboy]

This is a 2005 film based on the Ray Bradbury short story. I remember seeing previews and ads and thought it looked pretty good. But it got panned by critics and lasted about a week in the theaters. Well I finally caught it on DVD and I thought it was pretty good.. I liked the whole idea behind it. I thought they SFX were pretty good and it had a fairly cool time travel story.

If you don't know what the story is about.. here's a synopsis:

Don't change anything in the past.

Don't bring anything back.

Don't leave anything behind.

These rules were established by a businessman who has recently developed a time machine. With it he has created a business which offers prehistoric safari trips to wealthy hunters. Travis Ryer has been trained to lead these safaris. On one of these safaris, the guides are escorting two men along a path. They are attacked by an Allosaurus and the leader's gun fails, so the allosaurus does not die when it was scheduled to do so--thus breaking one of the rules of time travel.

Panicked by the attack, one of the explorers steps off the path in an attempt to ensure his own safety. The guides exchange gun parts with another gun, kill the allosaurus and return through the time portal. Unseen to the explorers, a muddy footprint has been left just off the path.

On the next expedition, Ryer is taking two other hunters on the time travel safari. He states that they are about to witness a volcanic eruption, but the volcano is already in the process of erupting, and they are forced to return to the present.

The time safari business calls on Sonia Rand, who invented the time travel machine, but she refuses to help anyone. Rand does explain that since they altered something in the past, the future will proceed to change in a series of "time waves." She says that the changes can't all happen at once, and that they will proceed in order of evolution: first, everything will reset, then the vegetation will change, then wildlife, and finally humans.

The business attempts to send Ryer back to fix the past, but a time wave hits and all the electricity goes out. Ryer and Rand must determine what caused the change before he can fix the past. They discover that a butterfly was stepped on during one trip into the past, and it critically altered the evolutionary chain. Another time wave hits just before they reach the portal and they must continue on foot. They reach the portal, but it doesn't work, so they decide to try to reach the university where there is an experimental portal.

They manage to reach the university, but thanks to the various 'evolutionised' creatures and plants, only Ryer and Rand are still alive. Rand manages to send Ryer back 65,000,001 years to dodge the time waves, then he is sent forward one year to the point when the original explorers traveled into the past. In the present, the final time wave hits and Rand is turned into a fishlike being. Meanwhile, Ryer tells the explorers about everything that will happen in the future. He stops the explorer from stepping off the path and killing the butterfly, and thus the future is saved.
Back in the present, Ryer is shown the video of the alternate Ryer who saved the future. He requests that they shut down the time portal to stop such an occurrence from ever happening again.

[Rico]

I saw that movie maybe about a year ago.  Kind of fun but I felt they missed some good things they could of done with it.  I do like the idea how a simple thing can change the future so much.  Fun stuff!

[JoSpiv]

I caught this on TV recently. 

I liked the idea of how one simple change can change so much in the future.   Of course it would never change in "Waves of time" like it does in the movie, but hey there's no such thing as a Flux Capacitor either.  :)

They got a pretty decent cast I thought.