Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. I myself saw SOUND OF THUNDER tonight and after reading the below two reviews... They eviscerate the film... and they might still be too kind on the flick. There's a reason the film has been delayed for such a long time and dumped in September without any advertising. The below two reviews go into specifics of why the film sucks so bad, but I almost didn't label this with a spoiler warning since I think you are only spoiled if you're going to go see the movie in question and I can't imagine anybody paying for this film.
The first review is a twofer from "batphantom" that starts with SOUND OF THUNDER and then goes on to THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE. I talked to someone tonight that saw EMILY ROSE and really dug it. If you go into it knowing that it's more drama than horror you might like it a little better than the below, supposedly. I can't wait to see it for myself. Now, enjoy the first batch... I should have my review of SOUND OF THUNDER up very soon. Until then, the below negativity on SOUND OF THUNDER has the Quint stamp of approval.
A SOUND OF THUNDER
So Peter Hyams has been trying to make a feature film based on Ray Bradbury’s classic “A Sound Of Thunder” for some time now. His success is the world’s failure. The film brings “Wow” to a whole new level. Bearing one of the worst scripts ever given the green light, Hyams’ film manages to insult not only the geeks in the audience, but pretty much everyone else unfortunate enough to be in the theater. Let’s take a look at the failures therein.
First up, the setting. It takes place in 2055 New York, and man, have we managed to make some strides over the next fifty years. New skyscrapers, several levels of elevated trains, and lots of square, ugly cars. The wide shots look pretty good, but every attempt to integrate the actors in anything remotely futuristic involves some of the worst green screen work on record. One shot has two actors walking down the street, and it actually looks like they’re walking in place. It’s laughable.
Second, the acting. Pretty much everyone phones it in, there’s no real sense of urgency from anyone. Edward Burns looks bored, Ben Kingsley hams up what little there is of his character, Catherine McCormack is hot and pissed off, and everyone else is just boring background dressing.
Ah, the script. Wow. Hyams and the writers better hope Bradbury isn’t very mobile these days, because he’s gonna want to put some hurt on somebody for raping his baby. What was a nice little short turns into “Damn the science, blow something up!” It makes “I, Robot” look like a straight line reading of the novel. SPOILERS: First off, they keep going back to kill the same dinosaur every time, since they know it’s about to get caught in a tar pit, with a nearby volcano about to blow for good measure. How do they not keep running into their other selves? The writers just don’t care. Rather than have the crew come back through the portal to find the effects of their transgression, there are TIMEWAVES that affect reality instantly, but in progressively more intense stages. When you see the effect the first time (Which the brilliant doctor knows is about to hit for no good reason), you’ll think New York is being hit by a giant tidal wave, but no, it’s a TIMEWAVE! About a day after they return, the first wave hits, bringing back plants and insects in prehistoric amounts. Then, the Lizard Baboons. Then, Superbats. And Megaeels. It’s pitiful. They can’t even decide how the waves work, When Burns tries to go back to fix things the first time, he’s in the wrong time frame, and a wave is heading right for him. He jumps back, and the TIMEWAVE hits almost immediately. At the end, he jumps just before the wave hits, but the past is unaffected this time around. Oh, the time travel fans will lose their minds when they see how little respect the writers had for any rules, they just change them to suit their needs, especially for the climax. The film is laid out like a video game. Move from place to place with a different goal for each, hit them with a TIMEWAVE to change the layout and the enemies, kill more creatures, kiss a secondary character goodbye, move on. People were walking out of the screening after they realized Hyams was just dragging things out. Then, when Burns finally manages to get back in time, this time he can see himself and the team just as they’re about to crush the butterfly, and as soon as he tackles the guy, he disappears. Oh, so now the effects are instantaneous? And on top of that, the addition of the exploding volcano to the story makes you wonder how the goddamn butterfly survives a massive pyroclastic flow and change everything? It’s almost like Hyams made this film just to piss off the geeks.
The Effects? Pretty sad across the board. The dinosaur looks like something from an Xbox game, the lizard baboons are okay, but the whole thing looks like it was rendered in low resolution, like they knew no one would go to see it in theaters.
All in all, this is one of the worst films I’ve ever seen in a theater. The short story clearly wasn’t designed to be dragged out for 103 minutes, and as I said before, it plays out like a bad videogame. Hyams filmography is loaded with wasted potential, and this is the worst of the lot.
THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE
Who dares tread upon the hallowed ground of “The Exorcist”? The latest victim is Scott Derrickson, who brought us “Urban Legends: The Final Cut” and “Hellraiser: Inferno”. Ah, now there’s a pedigree! The ads would have you believe that the story follows young Emily through her possession, but no, what you get is a thrilling courtroom drama! Yes, rather than dwell on the events themselves, the filmmakers decided that they’d use the trial of the priest who did the exorcism to frame the events of the actual deed. It’s a really bad choice, since the parts of the film that deal with the exorcism are well done, but it takes up about twenty minutes of screen time. Here’s the breakdown.
First, the script. It’s pretty damn weak. They’ve taken an interesting true story and turned it into a very special episode of “Law And Order: Special Victims Unit”. The real events took place in 1970-76, around the release of “The Exorcist”. They’ve more or less moved it to modern day, without making any overt point of doing so. They also changed the lead character from Anneliese Michel of Germany to Emily Rose of Anytown, USA. Hey, no one wants to see Germans getting possessed, right? Of course, by concentrating on the trial itself, they need to beef up the lawyer character, so they make her a power-hungry, ladder-climbing defense attorney who eventually goes through a crisis of faith, wondering if she’s being pursued by the same demons. The defense is hinged on the doctors prescribing “Gambutrol” to control what they believe are epileptic seizures, but it has the side effect of keeping the exorcism from being successful. They basically want the jury to think that possession is possible, and that the priest was looking out for Emily’s best interest. Of course, the script would have you believe it’s true anyway, since the only attempt to show the prosecutor’s side is via some alternate takes, showing Emily suffering without the special effects. It’s just not compelling. Clearly, they were afraid to go toe-to-toe with “The Exorcist”, so they chickened out and made it a courtroom drama, even though they’re selling it as a TRUE STORY full of screaming and things moving of their own accord. The conclusion also differs from the real story, vying for the happy ending rather than the truth of a six month sentence for not only the priest, but the girl’s parents as well.
The acting is pretty good, but many are wasted. Laura Linney is left to carry the film as the central character, but the writing is so thin that she isn’t given much to work with. Tom Wilkinson is, well, Tom Wilkinson, giving the same solid but unremarkable performance he’s been giving for some time now. Jennifer Carpenter is excellent as Emily, but there’s not nearly enough of her. Campbell Scott, Colm Feore, Henry Czerny, and Shohreh Aghdashloo are all totally wasted. Scott’s character is amusing if you think of him as Ned Flanders, Attorney At Law.
The direction is as weak as the script. TV level at best, though again, the exorcism bits are really well done, but not even remotely worth the price of admission.
Don’t be fooled by the ads and the hype, this is just a courtroom drama with some horror elements. It’s a shame they chickened out, since the real story would have been much more interesting than the final product.
Now for the kinder review of SOUND OF THUNDER. The one that says there's something worth while somewhere in the whole movie...
What's up guys, I had the chance to watch A SOUND OF THUNDER tonight and I wrote a little review. I hope you like it.
In my filmgoing life I?ve become accustomed to films produced by the Hollywood studio system to be mostly predictable in their quality. Movies tend to float somewhere around the gray area of mediocrity. Once in a while we are treated to a film that is much, much better than we expect, that transcend the intense scrutiny and control of the studio?s and become great, but this is rare. It is also rare for a film to be so bad that no amount of logical analysis can explain how such a bad movie could be allowed out of the gate, let alone to continue along it?s disasterous course toward pain, suffering, and dizzying incomprehensibility. If THE CONSTANT GARDNER exists on one end of the spectrum, then A SOUND OF THUNDER exists on the other.
A SOUND OF THUNDER begins amicably enough, bringing us to the time 2055, a world in which time travel is not only possible but profitable. A business enterprise, Time Safari, takes the rich and bored on trips to the Cretaceous to gun down dinosaurs that would have died anyway. It?s all part of their strict guideline of non-interaction, structured in the belief that if their impact on the time they visit is nil, there is no chance of hurting the timeline.
What infuriates me with this movie is just how well it opens. Ben Kingsley, playing the nefarious money-grubber and CEO of Time Safari looks like he?s having more fun with his lines than he has in years. Ed Burns lead?s a strong team of actors through expositionary scenes, making what is normally a mindless exercise into an opportunity to actually see these people enjoy their jobs and each other. It?s a brief spotlight on the positive, however, as things quickly go from passable to terrible. There is enough fuzzy, pseudo-science to give anyone a migraine, but even if you are somehow able to suspend your disbelief (A Herculean task here), the movie, rather than reward you for your forgiveness, continues to heap piles of shit on you by subjecting you to some of the worst CGI seen outside of a Sega CD game and plotlines that run on and on and on. Once the action starts to ramp up all thought of keeping hold of the promising internal conflicts of the characters is thrown out of the nearest window in favor of despicably-familiar scenes of running and driving away from ?evolved? dinosaurs. There is no pacing, no rhythm, as if the filmmakers wanted to structure this film like an experimental film about the hypocrisy of converging plot lines. Actions are taken and when there is no happy outcome, the same action is simply taken again. There is a sequence in the film that, in this reviewers mind, drags on for millennia, involving our protagonists running from one place to another in search of the reason for the disturbances to the present day timeline, but this is the kind of thing where a filmmaker would really benefit from a rough cut screening. Anyone with a grain of sense would see that there is simply too much there, too many chases.
And the creatures, because they aren?t really, in the disturbingly silly vernacular of the film, dinosaurs, range from being laughably hideous to almost ninja-like in their ability to not be seen. Most scenes are so dark that any reasonable CGI creation could look like the Pillsbury dough boy and still pass for a menacing dinosaur, yet these creatures move with the ferociousness of a drugged milk cow, most notably a dragon-like serpent that, in what is an almost sublimely-stupid scene, meanders up to one of our heroes, mouth open as if to attack, but is content to simply stand its ground, taking knife wounds like it?s nothing. There isn?t a grand diorama of creatures, either, just the same few monsters trotting out once in a while, taking their turns at being sadly ineffective and eschewing any kind of real menace. One of these creatures, clearly meant to channel the velocirapters of JURASSIC PARK, is unbelievable and painful to watch. But, as difficult as this may be to grasp, it might all be part of the grand design of the filmmakers, because the real terror of this film is supposed to be the plants. The city is overrun with vines that burst through 3 foot walls, tear up the city streets, and grab hold of those passerby unlucky enough to fall in their grasp and inject them with a deadly neurotoxin. We know that the plants are supposed to be the real threat of the film because again and again we are treated to moving shots of these plants in their bid to take over our world. The characters emote a kind of knowing dread and pass by the plants with all the care and caution that you might use to pass by your wife after a really, really bad fight.
No doubt the science behind this film was analyzed by someone and deemed understandable to the average moviegoer, but I don?t get it. The concept of the movie hinges upon the idea that impacting upon the past will change the future, and although this is the lynchpin of everything that happens in the movie, the things that happen as a result of this tampering are confusing and extremely difficult to believe. Instead of the future being instantaneously changed by events, the changes come as ?time waves?, which move over the surface of the planet like a strong wind and cause catastrophic changes in their wake. It?s all done with straight-faced understanding by the main characters but left me feeling like I was the butt of a particularly mean practical joke.
Some people like watching trainwreck movies like A SOUND OF THUNDER, but for everyone else I?d advise staying far away.
If you use this, call me SilentWar.
