Time Travel

Films concerning time travel is my second favourite film genre, the first (as people who know me will tell you) is the whole vampire / paranormal mythos. Ever since Back to the future was released in 1985, at the ripe old age of 12, time travel has been an absolute fave. In a past incarnation, i.e. at university ('92 - '96), I was heavily involved in the Quantum Leap phenomenon, authoring an email mailing list, and attending various different UK and US conventions, where I met many interesting people! ;-) More modern films like Donnie Darko and the wonderful Primer add a much deeper, and far cleverer, style of writing to the genre as well.

However, the main problem with most of these programmes / films, are the HUGE holes, which are obviously unintentional, but through which you can put a very large critical eye. This, I suppose, is inevitable with this subject, since the whole concept of paradoxes makes any logically sound idea very difficult indeed (if, indeed, you can even apply logic to such a situation!). Take a few situations in Back to the Future, why did George McFly (at the end of the film) not think "Hang on! Why does my youngest child look identical to a guy who helped me at school?", indeed, leading to the conclusion, "Is it my youngest child?" ;-) What about the scene with playing the guitar on stage, both Marty's elder brother and sister both have disappeared (and presumably don't therefore exist), how does he know them? Does time travel / interference really work this way? Who knows, but these are the types of question which lead you to have to suspend your disbelief with a lot of these films, otherwise you'll end up analysing the whole thing and not (as is presumably the directors vision) to enjoy the film.

It was in this light that I watched A Sound of Thunder, a CGI-laden movie adaptation of one of Ray Bradbury's short stories of the same name from 1952. Directed by Peter Hyams (the same director of the other time travel film (and Van Damme vehicle) Timecop, and starring Edward Burns, it features a future where Time Travel is invented and used to allow very rich people to travel back in time and participate in a carefully controlled safari hunt of an already doomed Allosaurus. So as not to alter the future the Allosaurus was chosen to be killed and left in a swamp which it originally died in. This event was then replayed many times for many different people. Of course, things go wrong in one of the "time jumps", one of the paying participants accidentally steps on a butterfly (presumably an allusion to the butterfly effect), and ends up seriously affecting evolution.

Now, with a critical eye, the CG effects, whilst averagely good, aren't very well tied in with the real actors, so in certain situations, it's very obvious that the "green screen" is used, and the computer used to control the jumps, TAMI (Time Alteration Mainframe Interface), is, to be honest, mostly annoying, smacking of Ziggy from Quantum Leap, but not nearly as well written. Another thing that immediately springs to mind is why if it's exactly the same period in history every time, do the people not meet themselves every jump? It's glossed over very neatly (i.e. completely), or indeed why the need to "slingshot" 65 million years is necessary to fix the damage, when a simple 72-hours "jump" to tell the team not to go would presumably be a lot easier?

The ending (spoiler alert) of managing to retain a video of the whole event, even though it technically never happened since they changed time, is a bit of a stretch of plausibility as well.

On a positive note, the film is quite enjoyable. The concept is very interesting, Ray Bradbury's genius for a good story (even from the 50's) is the film's saving point. Hammering home the butterfly effect from chaos theory (years before the concept was common) sets the mind racing about what super strict controls would have to be in place if time travel ever was invented in "reality", a person from the future even existing, never mind interacting, in the past would introduce bacteria / cells (cold viruses to name but one) from themselves which could seriously affect the mechanisms of evolution of the planet.

I admit, it's ended very quickly, and overly neatly. Is it worth the rental fee? Yeah, I think so. Just.