then boy, have I got a real bad movie for you. If any of you for whatever reason feel the need to flush $7.50 and 90 minutes of your life down the toilet, then by all means check out "Sound of Thunder."
One wonders how certain movies get made. Time travel movies, for instance. I think every possible wrinkle of that idea has been explored in either movies or science fiction stories,
ad infinitum. I think the last interesting wrinkle to the genre was done by Terry Gilliam in "12 Monkeys." Other than that though, it has all been done to death. Nevertheless, it is obviously still a reliable way to entice bored dumbasses like, uh, me in the theaters so the studios keep cranking them out. This one tries to breathe life into the shopworn time travel genre by adding dinosaurs to the mix. The idea is, a corporation develops time travel technology and uses it to send bored yuppies 65 million years into the past to shoot at, well, very big game. Nothing wrong with that idea; in fact, that was the basis for the nifty little Robert Heinlein short story upon which this movie is (very loosely) based. So, even though this sounds like another rehashing of "Jurassic Park," it's still got the potential to be a cool idea. But if you're going to do it, then for God's sake at least spend a little money on the special effects. The effects here, at least the dinosaurs, look like they're straight out of an old episode of "Land of the Lost." I shit you not, the dinosaur at the San Antonio Wax Museum is more lifelike than the one in this movie.
And a lot of "Sound of Thunder" is obviously shot in front of a green screen with the backgrounds digitally inserted later. That's fine, there's nothing wrong with that, either. To get an idea of how to do that and do it well, you have only to watch "Sin City," the whole of which was shot before a green screen. The characters in this movie walk around, ostensibly on a sidewalk in year 2055 Manhattan and you can literally see in their expressions that they don't believe it themselves. Your eyes tell you they're walking in this fantastic future city but their expressions say "I'm walking on a sound stage in front of a green screen."
I read an interview with Liam Neeson once where he talked about how tough green screen acting is because you have no scenery or props to play off of. As an actor, everything has to be in your mind because at the time you're shooting it, nothing's there. These actors, whether through lack of talent or competent direction, aren't up to it.
And for God's sake, can somebody please tell me why Ed Burns still has a career? Yeah, he was good in "Saving Private Ryan" but his was only a relatively small supporting role and the fact is that
everybody was good in that movie. He has sucked in everything I've seen him in since then. This guy has little screen presence, no human warmth and comes across as only marginally more likeable than Steven Seagal. His scenes, especially the ones where he was supposedly in mortal peril from marauding dino-monkeys (don't ask) were so bad they made me cringe.
Not only a bad movie but a laughably bad movie. Jesus, I need a life.
