A SOUND OF THUNDER -- What's the Deal?

[AndyDursin]

Don't ask me why but I have a soft spot for Peter Hyams movies, Ray Bradbury stories, and anything with dinosaurs (except T-REX with Whoopi Goldberg).

So...what's going on with A SOUND OF THUNDER? I assume it's been completed for 2 years now. The trailer showed up last year. The movie looks a mess (what does it have, seven credited screenwriters?), but I'm still curious in checking it out if/when Warner Bros decides to release it.

Trailer is here (site only says COMING SOON):

http://asoundofthunder.warnerbros.com/

[romanD]

yeah, was wondering the same. trailer looks ok, though some effects are surprisingly bad for this director and cast... hyams always make enjoyable movies, never really great, but always entertaining and I like his photgraphy (though he never changes his style at all). Was hoping for a good action/horror score by Debney, with whom he worked a couple times, but the score ended up by Nick Glennie-Smith, my personal choice for "worst composer of the 90ies". So.. OH MY!!!!

[MikeJ]

I'm a big Peter Hyams junkie. I wish this movie would just come out already... Maybe studio executives got nervous about Ben Kingsley's hairpiece.

[Harry Chen]

A new trailer says September. Finally! Unfortunately, with all this delay, I've lost a lot of confidence regarding this project.
Trailer link:

http://pdl.warnerbros.com/wbmovies/asou ... ler_hi.mov

[AndyDursin]

I lost confidence after I saw the first trailer

Looks like it's being dumped on Labor Day weekend -- never a good sign...but maybe I'll have to do a double-bill with that and Gilliam's BROTHERS GRIMM!

[Carlson2005]

And lo, as part of a contractual obligation deal, it creeps out into 800 screens in the US this weekend with minimal publicity before a probable straight-to-video release in the rest of the world. Must be good...

[AndyDursin]

Shockingly, the local critic here in RI gave it three stars (out of five) and said the movie was entertaining in a kitchen-sink kind of way.

Then again, this IS the same guy who gave BEWITCHED five stars!!

[romanD]

hi fellas.. just returned from vacations in Spain, attended the Tomatino Tomatoe Battle... was freakin fun!!!!

but also they showed SOUND OF THUNDER and as spanish movie theaters are very cheap I gave it a try.

Well... the movie would have been great if it would have cost around 50 million dollars more! lol...

what was the budget for it? 1 buck??? Not even in a d-t-v crap premiere Ive seen so lousy effects. If you thought the T-Rex in the trailer was bad, wait until you see the rest! Ok, the Baboonmonsters looked pretty good and very decently animated (probably a leftover form the RELIC-files as the creatures looked almost liked the Kothoga, but moved certainly like it!).
The story is fine and moves at a good pace... this could have been a great monster movie and has some nice ideas and set pieces (the subway scene). But the ridiculous effects kill everything. The underwater stuff is hilarious! Or the future scenes which the animated cars (just notice that there are just 2 kinds of cars!), even chase scenes are done with animation, no real cars used! And the Matrix-effects are totally out of style now... especially when badly done!

The sound is thundering though.
The music is surprisingly big and good for Nick Glennie-Smith, but then he had to rip off Debney's Relic 1:1... they even used the relic score in the trailer so the director really liked it, hu? And Debney would have cost more than the whole movie probably...

Well, the movie is entertaining and I saw much worse movies this year, but it saddens to see how a cool idea, some good monster designs and future designs (by Sid Mead for heaven's sake), good actors (even 2 German stars!) are wasted in a movie, solely because nobody gave the director any money to play with. I wonder why it was even made, because all of the participants are hurting their career with this. Except Mr. Glennie-Smith, who has never been any bigger anyway...

go see it... if you don't care for the effects you have a fun movie. And if you do care, then you have a great trash-event in front of you and what happens to Mary Cormack in the showdown is probably meant to be poetic, but you will scream laughing about this silliness! What a riot and worth the admission alone!

[AndyDursin]

Thanks Roman. From the sounds of it, this is pretty much the best we could have hoped for with a movie that's been on the shelf for months.

That said, between gas prices and the $10 ticket charge, I'll still likely be waiting until DVD

[Carlson2005]

Shelved for two years, more like!

The reason it got made is that sometimes so much money is spent on pre-production and development on an outright stinker - Thunderbirds, Catwoman, Space Truckers and Biggles spring to mind - they figure that rather than blow that money, they might as well proceed. And then it gets worse and worse...

But this must be the only movie this century where you'd actually rather have wanted Renny Harlin and Pierce Brosnan to have stayed onboard instead of walking!

[romanD]

they were once attached to it?

it's too bad the studio didnt have more confidence in the movie, but however they release it in the theaters, which is strange... maybe contractual things...

I guess it was once a big budget movie, given Syd Mead and Crash McMCreery (great Stan Winston designer) doing the designs. And Im sure the cast wouldn't have signed on after the final budget was made public... lol...

still, the cast is nice, Edward Burns a fine lead (and he really tries hard to sell himsekf to the female audience... i.e. he takes his shirt off every 5 minutes... lol) and Catherine McCormack deserves more movies!

But what the hell happened to Ben Kingsley? He's great here (but maybe he's just on drugs, I dunno)... didn't he receive an oscar nomination 2-3 years ago? And now he is only in turds like this or the upcoming new Uwe Boll disaster? What's up Ben?

[romanD]

here I found some info why the movie's effects are so bad:

"One major reason for the film's long delay is that the original production company went bankrupt during post-production, and there simply wasn't money to finish the film."


still, I read that the budget was around 80 millions. Probably spent before the actual shooting... lol... but the bankrupcy thing could explain why for example hundreds of CGI-labs did the effects and that... they just tried to finish the movie in any way. Maybe they should have given some filmstudents a chance... the students from the filmschool in Ludwigsburg here in Germany did a lot of the stuff for ID4 for example.

[Carlson2005]

Well, I finally got to see this even though, despite technically being a UK-German-Czech-US co-production (hmm, lotta tax shelters there) there are no plans to release it even on DVD over here. I was prepared for the worst from the terrible reviews and half-hoping for, if not another Lifeforce, at least a Dreamcatcher, but dammit... I really, really enjoyed it. It's a terrifically enjoyable B-movie idea, much better executed by far than The Relic and, though no world beater, a lot of fun. The money problems show in some of the effects - not so much the critters but the really poor integration of the backprojected cityscapes - and Edward Burns doesn't have the charisma to really carry the movie, but as a popcorn flick I thought it was great fun. And it has man-eating Baboonosaurs! How can you not like a movie where the big monsters are man-eating Baboonosaurs?

So sue me, I had a great time!

[romanD]

the subway underwater FX were a total joke! the baboonosaurus however quite good animated...

the pacing is fast, the story good.. with perfect effects it could have been a blast!