"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.

oh wonderful

[nomadic]

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

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!"

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.

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

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.