At the start of “A Sound of Thunder,” One was that the quality was on par to an average stinker on the Sci Fi Channel, and the other was that there couldn’t possibly be that much truth to the suckiness of said film. At the start, our heroes are on prehistoric terrain and in enters a dinosaur; a dinosaur that is really intent on eating them. The whole time I watch this, I’m thinking to myself “This couldn’t be the special effects, they must be in a simulator” which is usually the case in films in which we think one scenario is actual distress, and it ends up being a complete red herring.
But no, unfortunately this was the height of the special effects we’re being offered. The special effects are on par with a basic film you’d see about a giant squid on the Sci-Fi Channel, and the story is just as boring. I wasn’t prepared to bash this, I was in all honesty hoping to be surprised, but I wasn’t. If you can believe that the white marshmallow puff on Ben Kingsley’s head is actual hair, you can believe that Edward Burns with his Bahston accent is a scientist/soldier. Many brilliant films get passed over and under-promoted, and that’s a damn shame. But “A Sound of Thunder” is basically the exception to the rule. This is an awful piece of dreck, and I’m not saying that to be funny. This is awful. The special effects are beyond sub-par.
At one point Burns and the lovely Jemima Rooper are walking along the street (2055: the future), and it’s so blatantly obvious that the entire landscape is computer generated, and they’re simply walking on a treadmill, that you can’t help but cringe and then proceed with a laugh of amusement and sheer embarrassment for the actors. It becomes too ridiculous to watch at many points. Its clear Burns and Rooper aren’t walking along a street since they’re almost motionless. But you have to wonder where the money for a $52 million dollar film went. Because it looks as if they paid off all the actors, and used three million for the film.
“A Sound of Thunder” seems to want to tell a fun story about these people fucking up the future and the space time continuum, but it’s so bogged down in horrible special effects, terrible direction, and cringe-worthy miscasting. But there’s so much more to the terrible aspects of this forgettable and rather terrible sci-fi yawnathon. Reptile baboons, the “Jurassic Park” inspired climax, Oyelowo’s hilarious hallucinatory breakdown, and the rather bland gun fights littered throughout. “A Sound of Thunder” doesn’t seem to want to be a bad film, yet in the end it really just is. Hyams’ film is by no means the worst film ever made, but because of the atrocious special effects, boring story, unconvincing acting courtesy of Burns, and lame brained action sequences, “A Sound of Thunder” is really bad nonetheless.