A Sound of Thunder

A Sound of Thunder is a cautionary tale about mankind destroying itself through the careless use of time travel. More importantly however, was the fact that this movie projects that the Cubs will finally win that elusive World Series title in 2022 and again in 2046—meaning that even if the entire world is destroyed, at least everyone on the north side of Chicago will die happy.

The film takes place in 2055, when the ability to travel through time has been perfected by corporate mogul Charles Hatton (Ben Kingsley). Hatton’s company, Time Safari, allows high paying customers a chance to travel 65 million years into the past in order to hunt an Allosaurus during the late Cretaceous period—quite a feat really, considering that Allosaurs lived during the late Jurassic, 85 million years prior. Nevertheless, having apparently conquered reality as well as time, the Time Safari team leads countless hunting expeditions to the exact same point in time to kill the same Allosaur. The rules for each trip are as follows: 1. Don’t change anything; 2. Don’t leave anything behind; 3. Don’t bring anything back with you. Needless to say, people in future Chicago apparently don’t care about the integrity of the space time continuum and blatantly disregard the rules by squashing a prehistoric butterfly. All hell proceeds to calmly break loose.

Unfortunately, this is the point of no return in the movie, and anyone who has any capacity for rational thought whatsoever should probably just walk out of the theater. After the hunting expedition goes horribly awry, the team returns to 2055 thinking that they managed to escape without altering history. Once they step outside however, um...nothing has changed. No, seriously. Apparently, changes in the past have absolutely no effect on the future whatsoever—for 24 hours. Pretty soon “time waves” start showing up every so often and gradually change the present, at first with climate changes, followed by vegetation, and ending with more complex organisms—human beings being the last thing that will presumably change. The Time Safari scientists scramble to find a way to go back and prevent the butterfly from being killed, while the world around them is drastically affected by an alternate evolutionary path in which literally everything seems to be predatory by nature. This universal predatory behavior includes plants, which at one point actually make a physical effort to chase the scientists.

There were many elements of unbelievability in the film, which despite being a science fiction movie should still have some semblance of reality given that it takes place on earth. I can forgive the filmmaker’s take on how time travel’s subsequent repercussions would occur incrementally, but when someone (ostensibly a scientist) refers to a particle accelerator as being basically a “plug and play,” device then I really start to get exasperated. But maybe I’m wrong, in which case someone should really inform the director at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center about this groundbreaking new use for particle accelerators.

Don’t get me wrong, this movie was definitely entertaining, and in all fairness it wouldn’t have been possible for them to make a movie like this using the constraint that changes in the past would instantaneously affect the future. Of course, at one point in the movie a change in the past actually does instantly change the present without any time waves, so apparently the time wave ripple effect only happens some of the time. Needless to say, the story itself, while inherently flawed, is quite intriguing, so I recommend that you see the movie. But, don’t get caught up in the details.