A SOUND OF THUNDER
Year: 2005
USA: Warner Bros Pictures
Cast: Edward Burns, Catherine McCormack, Ben Kingsley, Jemima Rooper, David Oyelowo, Wilfried Hochholdinger, August Zirner, Corey Johnson, Scott Bellefeville, Andrew Blanchard, Heike Makatsch, Sai-Kit Yung
Director: Peter Hyams
Countries: USA / Germany / Czech Republic
USA: 103 mins
USA Rated: PG-13 for sci-fi violence, partial nudity and language
USA Release Date: 2 September 2005
Synopsis
In the near future, time travel will be an exciting, if unpredictable, reality.
For a price, rich adventurers can stir their dormant killer instincts by booking safaris back to the Prehistoric age to hunt real, live dinosaurs.
There are only three essential rules: Don't change anything in the past; don't leave anything behind; and most important, don't bring anything back. The slightest alteration might impact the existing course of evolution in ways that no one can imagine.
Based on a short story by award-winning author Ray Bradbury, A SOUND OF THUNDER opens on the year 2055 in downtown Chicago where a very elite travel agency, Time Safari Inc, has cornered the lucrative time-traveling market with an exclusive prehistoric hunting package. Time Safari Inc. is the hottest ticket in town.... until the unthinkable happens.
Someone breaks the rules. And evolution runs off its tracks.
The changes come in waves. They start small, affecting the atmosphere and lower life forms first, then move rapidly up the food chain with each subsequent pass. Within 24 hours dramatic transformations appear throughout the city, spurring residents from curiosity to growing alarm and finally panic.
Thousands of fish beach themselves on the Lake Michigan shore. Plant life grows to monstrous proportions as if reclaiming some ancient tropical territory, bursting through the pavement with great sinuous roots, overturning cars in the street and engulfing entire buildings from inside and out. Then come the insects, fast-moving voracious organisms resembling giant roaches and locusts, streaming over everything in deadly hordes.
Species of predatory creatures suddenly emerge, in reptilian form, with rapier reflexes and surprisingly intelligent features, darkening the sky and running rampant through an increasingly hostile and terrifying landscape.
Only two people guess what might be happening: Dr Travis Ryer (Edward Burns), who leads the Time Safari expeditions into the past, and Dr Sonia Rand (Catherine McCormack), the gifted physicist who developed the technology that makes these journeys possible. Time Safari CEO Charles Hatton (Sir Ben Kingsley) stole the largely untested technology from Rand and has been using it despite her warnings. Now, it appears her worst fears are realized.
It used to be our world. Now it's theirs.
Threatened on all sides and fast running out of time, Ryer and Rand must find a way to go back and correct whatever catastrophic error was made, to save themselves and the human race from certain extinction. But as each new wave of change rolls forward from the Prehistoric past, their world continues to collapse all around them.
