"A Sound of Thunder" Movie This Summer

Syberghost writes "Ray Bradbury's classic short story "A Sound of Thunder" is being released thus summer as a movie. It's directed by Peter Hyams, who's done the time travel thing before, but it appears that some of the major characters from the Bradbury story aren't in the credits."

Comments

Is this Really the Same Story?

[TheWanderingHermit]

I just read the synopsis in the link.

To me, the original story was a great short. The ending was perfect and there was a great timing to everything.

But to make it movie length, it sounds like the bulk of the plot in the movie takes place after the ending of the story. If you want to make a story about time travel changing the present, why ruin a great short by turning it into a preface to another story? Why not just come up with a simple reason history is changed and THEN tell the story about dealing with the changes?

I love Ray Bradbury's stories. There's a wonderful sense of timing, rhythm, playfulness, poetry, horror, and fun. It sounds like some of the most important elements of what makes a Bradbury story so good are being ignored here.

Maybe, instead of wasting the time and money to see this, I'll find a DVD of Francois Truffaut's adaption of Farheinheit 451 and watch that instead.

Re:Is this Really the Same Story?

[B'Trey]

I think there are much bigger weaknesses than that only the winner of the election changes. The changes that occur come about because Eckel steps off the path and kills a butterfly. However, if changes that small affect things, then the entire safari would change things. An animal sees the metal path they errected and changes its course to get around it. It escapes death (or alternately, find it) because it's in a different location when a predator comes by. The T. rex sees the hunters and charges toward them. It altered its path and steps on a butterfly or mouse that it otherwise would not have. When the shoot the T. rex, it falls in a slightly different location and takes out a tree branch that it otherwise would not have struck. There's a birds nest full of eggs on that branch that tumble to the ground and never hatch.

In short, the idea that staying on a path and killing an animal that's about to die would change nothing but simply stepping off the path would alter things doesn't hold water. Any intrusion into the environment is almost guaranteed to change things.

That being said, it's still a great story.

Re:Is this Really the Same Story?

[B'Trey]

The point of good SciFi is to tell a good story. Period. Otherwise, it's simply propoganda.

Good SciFi, like all literature, should explore the human condition. That may very well include expositions about the dangers of certain technologies or social trends. But those are side effects - a property of the story rather than the purpose for it.

Second, science fiction must be as accurate and technically feasible as possible. Otherwise, it isn't SciFi - it's fantasy.

oh wonderful

[nomadic]

Considering what they did to I, Robot, I've got a bad feeling about this.

Re:oh wonderful

[badboy_tw2002]

Good luck finding people to criticize Blade Runner. Most adaptations of books definately take liberties with characters, plot points, theme, tone, etc. because you're creating a different work of art (art is used in its loosest terms here :) What you're seeing on the screen is often the collaborative vision of a bunch of people (screenwriters, directors, actors, producers, art directors, cinematagrophers, special effects artists, and more) of what the book can realize on the big screen.

A lot of time the realities of the process can mess stuff up a lot, and often times commercial, moral, or political interests can REALLY mess stuff up. But there have been some good adaptations out there, even in sci-fi. I doubt many would argue 2001: A Space Oddessy is a terrible movie. The latest Lord of the Rings accomplished an excellent rendering of the story to the screen and probably saw the biggest jump in Tolkien's readership. There have been many successful conversions that have convinced me to pick up the book, and discover new authors. Sci-fi definately has its troubles because serious sci-fi loses a lot of its social commentary in favor of action and aliens. The fact is though nothing in a movie can take away from the original book (aside from a gaudy tie-in book cover), so if you don't like it, don't watch it and recommend others read the book instead.

I guess to summarize, you never really get a 1:1 translation of book to movie, and there are varying degrees of raping and pillaging to be done to a story. Sometimes (GASP) the movie version even cleans some things up and improves on where the book is.

Re:A whole movie?

[TheWanderingHermit]

Check the date. It's August 29, 2002. I wonder what he thinks about it now -- after seeing all the changes and the last script version.

In this case, so what if it's changed?

[HarveyBirdman]

Wasn't the original story rather unsound in its time travel mechanics?

It's the one where they go hunting the dinosaur, right? And one guy crushes a butterfly and changes history. They get back to the future and the written language is completely changed, but the result of an election merely flips, as if the written language could changed, and there'd even BE an election, much less with the same two candidates.

I even recall an interview with Bradbury where he admitted the ending was not very well thought out.

There's a much better short story (I forget who wrote it) where they send a spherical probe back in time, and a project scientists is talking to reporters. The probe bounces back and forth in history, and each time we go back to the press conference, the people slowly change from humans to weird alien creatures. At the end of the experiement, the speaker declares, "See? Nothing is chnaged!"

Re:In this case, so what if it's changed?

[TheWanderingHermit]

Hey, it's just a short story.

And Ray Bradbury has always been more interested in the "poetry" of what he writes. It has a wonderful impact and is a good story. Do you want to mess up all that (the timing, the pacing, the setup, theme, and everything else), but insisting he spend more time on making it perfect?

If it was a matter of physics, that's one thing, but when you consider that we don't even know WHAT effects changing a timeline would really have, is it really necessary to pick on details like that?

hey, wait a second

[SuperBanana]

Currently my film "A Sound of Thunder" is being filmed in Czechoslovakia

[thinks back to last movie he watched in the theater, and the MPAA PR piece lecturing him about stealing food from Joe American Movie Worker's baby's mouth]

What's wrong with this (pardon the pun) picture?

Left in the past

[Phazz666]

The makers of the time travel films don't seem to realise that another movie like this is just infringing on the copyrights of time travel movies before it. Back to the future was good for its time but the concept of time travel should be left in the past.

Re:Heh, I remember hearing about this one...

[nomadic]

My money is on the upcoming "Fahrenheit 451" directed by Frank Darabont.

Mine isn't. What the hell's the point of making a new Fahrenheit 451? I mean, I like to think Truffaut's version was pretty damn adequate.

Re:Heh, I remember hearing about this one...

[l0ungeb0y]

" I'm not sure that the guy who directed "Timecop" and "Sudden Death" was the right choice for a replacement"

Yeah... and by applying that logic you could say that the guy that directed Bad Taste and Meet the Feelbes probably wasn't the best pick to direct LOTR...

I'd give the guy a chance... some people just make the pictures they can get signed on for, for all you know this guy's just been waiting for a decent screenplay with the right producers to make his "masterpiece".

Time Paradox's

[GrpA]

From my childhood reading of science fiction, I always remember Sound of Thunder(Bradbury) and Let the Ants Try(Pohl). Both had a profound effect on my way of thinking.

I spent many days as a young kid wondering if it would be possible to change history - after all if you changed the future, would the future you have gone back into the past at all?

I learned the answer many years later in electronics. In electronics, it's called "Negative Feedback"... ie, take the output signal and feed in back into the input... The output affects the input, but the signal still continues.

Now I wonder on how such a simple well thought out story can possibly change the future by altering the way people think and view the world.

Still many of Ray Bradbury's original stories still occupy parts of my idle thoughts even this much later.

That this man's writing has affected my thinking for so long and has permeated my thoughts enough to consider things I may have never considered otherwise is reason enough to see how the movie turns out...

GrpA.

Re:Mirrors

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you PLEASE stop stealing bandwidth from Akamai customers? Remember, customer 1601 is PAYING for that. Your little website redirect is fooling no one (except the moderators, apparently).

Your prior bandwidth theft, in just the last 24 hours:

• here
• here
• here

karmatic - thief and karma whore....

About the "Credits"

[gbulmash]

...it appears that some of the major characters from the Bradbury story aren't in the credits.

Don't imagine that because a character isn't listed on IMDb 4.5 months before release, the character isn't in the film. IMDb rarely has complete credits this far before release. I'm surprised the Slashdot editors let such a silly claim through.

I'm sure the folks at IMDb appreciate that you take their listings so literally, but they try to get a title into the database as soon as it's confirmed that the film is actually greenlighted. That initial listing may have nothing more than the studio, writer, director and one or two stars. Then they add more credits and other info as they become available.

I know people there. They won't have "full" / "official" credits until they get them from a studio source (a month or two before release), a press kit (a week or two before release), or if the studio is still afraid of the Internet (and some are), they get the full credits after the film is released, usually from dedicated users who sat through the credits in theaters, scribbling furiously.

- Greg

feh.

[Jamie Zawinski]

I guess I'm the only one here who thinks the original story was just not very good at all? Not only doesn't it follow its own internal rules about time travel in any logical way, I also don't think the writing is any good.

Given that, the "Time Cop" guy probably wasn't an inappropriate choice.

Re:Time Travel in Movies

[vidarh]

Twelve Monkeys definitively definitively did not make use of a time loop. A time loop refers to time repeating for one or more individuals, but in twelve monkeys, the main character doesn't loop - he is purposefully sent back to different times and places, and his earlier selves are still there (at the end, for instance, when we see him seeing himself). It doesn't match the Wikipedia entry you refer to.

The thing with Twelve Monkeys is that we get to know so little about the future/present/whatever, that we don't really know whether anything gets changed, and so there is very little basis for saying anything about it's tretment of time travel.

Problem with the story

[idesofmarch]

Couldn't the fact that the dinosaur was killed in a different spot on the ground affect history just as much? Who knows how many butterflies it crushed when it fell, and how many other butterflies it failed to crush a few yards away? I cannot believe he safari company did not think of this, as they went to extremes to preserve history in every other way. Things like this really bother me, as you can tell.

Flawed story, Flawed movie

[darkjohnson]

I almost worked on this - the script was AWFUL and way weaker than the short story. There is no logic to the premise and they successfully transferred that to the script. But..with the right amount of effects and marketing it'll probably break even.

Re:America

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but being "American" can sometimes refer to both Canada/USA/Mexico and not necessarily USA