Saturday, June 03, 2006

A Sound of Thunder


I didn't even know they'd made a movie out of Ray Bradbury's famous short story, that's how fast this came and went from the theaters. It's been probably thirty years or more since I read the story, but both of my kids read it in their high school English classes, so when we spotted the DVD at Blockbuster we decided to watch it.

Of course, there's not enough material in Bradbury's short story about time travel gone awry to support a feature-length film, so the scriptwriters took the title and the basic concept and used them as a springboard for an action-packed, special-effects-laden SF/horror shoot-em-up. I'm not a big fan of Edward Burns, but he's okay here as the hero. Ben Kingsley is given almost nothing to do as a greedy millionaire. The supporting cast sort of runs together. The special effects looked pretty good at times, but at other times resembled the graphics from a video game. Despite its flaws, though, I watched this one with a fair amount of interest. It's not a great movie by any means, but it's not as bad as some of the reviews suggested.

As for Ray Bradbury, I really ought to go back and reread a lot of his stories. I was a major fan of his work for a long time but sort of drifted away and haven't read any of it in years.

2 comments:

Charles Gramlich said...

I rented this movie for the same reasons as you did and thought it was pretty decent. I liked the idea of successive waves of time distortation. I still have a newer collection or two of Bradbury's around but haven't felt in the mood to read them. His style at least has chaned a lot since the old days when I was devouring everything he had out. Btw, James, I've started my own blog at http://charlesgramlich.blogspot.com/ I thought I'd give it a whirl.

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