Plot spoilers ahead!!!


So...after about 4 years, various mishaps, disasters, floods, changes of cast and directors, financial problems etc...Peter Hyams version of Ray Bradbury's short story A Sound Of Distant Thunder finally gets a release on dvd.

Unsurprisingly there are no extras save for two trailers for the movie itself, qualitywise pic and sound are ok, though not exceptional. (This is another early UK import release of the R1, by the way).

And it will come as no surprise to anyone after a gestation period like that it's a bit of a turkey. Think Species or the updated Godzilla remake, and you get the idea. It's not totally unwatchable...the basis of Bradbury's original story is still interesting, and to be honest it does become so ludicrous and mind-numbingly awful you just have to see it through to the end.

Plot spoilers ahead!!!

The original story revolves around the concept of Time Safari's, adventure trips back in time to the dinosaur age on big-game hunts, though under strictly controlled conditions - they must stick to a special path/walkway so as not to interfere with any life forms, and are only allowed to kill designated creatures that it has been determined will die through other means anyway.

Unfortunately, one of the party unwittingly steps on and kills a butterfly...and when they get back to the present they find they cannot understand what language is being spoken, and signs on the walls of the laboratory are unreadable, that's when they realise that they have interferred with the process of evolution...

And that's it.

So, the movie initially retains the central premise, but of course being a 2 hour blockbuster hollywood movie , the plot and story are "opened out" and altered to suit the requirements of the dumb teenagers this movie is obviously aimed at.

In this version, time is not altered in one fell swoop, but every few hours in "time waves" (Cue dated Matrix style bullet photography...yawn), huge energy waves that sweep over the earth and change evolution so that initially only plant life is changed, but eventually creatures are altered and man himself will be too - hence the way is paved for lots of silly CGI plants and creatures to attack the protagonists at every turn as they try to put things right.

So what went wrong?

Well, the plot construction, not unlike The Island, takes a potentially interesting idea and soon dispenses with it in favour of running, shooting, chasing scenes involving various CGI mutant creatures - it has to be said the in places the CGI is very, very ropey, the creatures just do not convince at all - occasionally some of the shots of devastation as the city is altered by the time waves are ok, but shot's of the busy city streets with futuristic cars driving around look just like something from a video game.

I can only assume this is down to budgetary issues, and this very much looks like a case of damage limitation by just getting the movie finished as quickly as possibly so everyone can fulfil their contracts and move on.

There are also far too many last-minute escapes and credibility-stretching acts of heroism, and Ben Kingsley's silver fright wig is possibly the scariest thing in the movie - not a movie he is likely to want to remember either.

It's also one of those movies where characters just do the dumbest things...in one scene as an explosion is about to happen on the top floor of a building, two characters jump blindly out of the window...yes, completely blind...from the top of the bloody building! And what happens, their fall is broken...by a tree that just happens to have just appeared in the last time wave.

Oh, and then there are the baboon-like mutants, who are impervious to gunfire (yes, apparently that's evolution for you folks), but have one weak spot which is their throat. So...what do they do when they are about to attack someone? Why, they stand upright with their head in the air and bellow, giving the person a clear shot at their throat. That's nice of them, innit?

There were so many plot holes I just gave up trying to make sense of it in the end...if the time waves alter the face of the landscape and everything else, how is it the research facility where the time portal is is not affected? Why does the transport system still work? If they were able to determine that the dinosaur they kill is about to die when a volcano erupts so killing it will not affect time...surely the same fate will befall the butterfly anyway when the volcano erupts?

And the biggest one of all...if at the end of the movie the whole thing was prevented by the main character going back to a couple of minutes before the incident and preventing the butterfly being killed, then the whole thing never happened, right?

Which if you think about it, negates the movies whole existence...oh, if only.