Oh, right. This guy.
ZERO talent.
Posted on 09/02/2005 4:00:25 PM PDT by frogjerk
THE Ed Burns time-travel flick "A Sound of Thunder" takes us back 65 million years, to approximately the last moment when anyone still thought Ed Burns was talented.
It's 2055. Burns plays Dr. Travis Ryer, a scientific genius in Chicago who works for a time-traveling safari company that takes rich, dumb clients on tours to dinosaur days.
After zapping themselves into the Cretaceous period, Ryer and Co. lay down a fussy invisible plank, sort of like grandma's plastic furniture covers, to make sure nobody steps on anything in the ecosystem. Harming a single butterfly or moving a grain of pollen, Ryer warns, can totally alter the course of history, even threaten the existence of the human race.
Shooting dinosaurs is cool, though.
In the prehistoric jungle, the time travelers are startled by an angry roar, and forced to confront what appears to be footage from "Land of the Lost." The T. rex-like allosaurus they meet is a jerking, arthritic visual effect that not only isn't as scary as the "Jurassic Park" monsters, it isn't as scary as the "Jurassic Park" lunch box.
Ryer shoots it with impunity because his sarcastic British-accented computer, T.A.M.I., can pinpoint dinosaurs who are about to die in a few minutes anyway. So pumping a 20-ton Cretaceous animal full of laser ammunition won't alter history a jot. But hands off that pollen!
The safari company's profit-mad CEO Charles Hatton is played by a seriously lost Ben Kingsley with Clorox-white hair. Hatton, a zillionaire who seems to own only one
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Save your money for gas!
See? I really did read the articles!!
Sounds like one of those really really bad movies that will become a cult classic, like Plan 9 From Outer Space.
I read this in school 15 years ago or so, and I doubt it was in Playboy. I have a feeling the original idea is somewhere else.
Ray Bradbury wrote the original back in the early Fifties. It can be found in several of his anthologies.
Dang it, if you're going to do that sort of thing they're going to expect us all to do it.
I hope you're happy.
Oh, right. This guy.
ZERO talent.
Shhh... Poetic license, and all that.
At least in Bradbury's short story, the plot holes were excusable in service to the "punchline", the twist ending, since it was barely more than a "one liner" anyway.
But blown up to movie-length proportions (or if anyone had ever tried to make a novel out of it), it is stretching things rather too obviously.
"Ed Burns: When you can't afford the look-alike with actual talent, Edward Norton."
"The concept for this tale was a short story published in Playboy magazine back in the 1980s.
See? I really did read the articles!!"
I believe you. However, this was originally a short story by Ray Bradbury, of the same title. Probably written in the early 60's.
Actually, I would much prefer a "rehash" of the *good* original ideas that are still out there unfilmed in the classic science fiction novels, as opposed to the "original" drek they're slapping onto scripts these days just because the producer's sister's boyfriend's cousin has delusions of scriptwriting ability, or can be hired cheap enough that the bulk of the budget can be used to pay "stars" gobs more than they're actually worth.
if it hasn't been made yet, its still original.
And while it was an interesting story, warning major plot point to be reveled as I remember it basically consists of a hunter killing a butterfly (all the dinosaurs killed would have died from natural causes within a short time of the kill) by stepping off a suspended walkway. The unnatural death of that butterfly so changed the future that when they returned to the present all the sings were in German. The Nazis had won WW2. The guied shoots the hunter and that is the Sound of Thunder.
An interesting, as I remember very, short story; but not really enough for a full length movie.
Yeah. I read it in a Sci-Fi collection.I remember the hunting, etc, and the guy steps on a butterfly and screws up history. But I can't remember the author or the title. I DO remember he wrote a few more stories with the same characters/time travel/ hunting theme.
Then it was a reprint. 'A Sound of Thunder' appeared in the July 1956 issue of Playboy.
See post 18.
" See? I really did read the articles!!"
But how are your eyes now?
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