A Sound of Thunder (2005)

Elevator Pitch: In 2055 a Chicago based company, Time Safari, offers visits to the dinosaur age. The visitors are cautioned not to touch anything and the visitors experience the same event every time, and kill a dinosaur with guns firing ice pellets. On one visit the guns malfunction resulting in a rapid evacuation, and thereafter things begin to change in the present. Travis Ryer, the expedition leader, and Sonia Rand the developer of the time machine software band together to find out what has happened and hopefully to restore the world to its former state. As time passes things change for the worse and the group of survivors are gradually picked off. Will they make it?

Content: There is no sex or nudity and just a bit if drinking as those returning from the expeditions celebrate. The expeditions take place repeatedly killing a dinosaur (apparently an Allosaurus). The characters spend a surprising amount of time on the street, as a variety of weird vehicles pass. Once the world is changing we see the buildings becoming engulfed in vegetation and as successive ‘time waves’ pass the development of different species of animal predominantly a sort of baboonosaur, and then enormous bats and an aquatic beast. There is a lot of water involved nearly drowning people.

A View: This outing was thoroughly panned by nearly everybody.  It cost $80 million (estimated) and grossed $11 million. So not  hit then. It is really difficult to tackle time travel successfully. In this film the plot relies on a dead butterfly being brought back to the present, but in the end it fails utterly to fulfil the best known rule that you should not go back and meet yourself.  Check out Stewie and Brian the Time Travel Paradox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CII_Q2aXa-k .  Even though this disaster sounds perversely attractive, give it a miss.

Additional info: As well as all the critics complaints, bad acting, poor CGI, awful effects, they also complained about Ben Kingsley’s hair.