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"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."
From that one story you have hosts of other authors refering to "butterfly effects" and "quantum butterflys".
That's not a simple accomplishment given the length of the story. But then, I like a lot of his stuff.
Has anyone read up on this?
Not only have they completely missed the point of the story, they've come up with some lame ass idea in order to make an action film out of it.
The story additions don't make any sense - he wipes out humanity, so they must go back to fix it? Well, if he wiped out humanity, who is it that's going to go back exactly? And if he wiped out humanity, that's a paradox! He would have to exist in order to go back and screw up the timeline.
Of course, they solve this by using a "time wave" which hasn't caught up with our time yet (then, how did were they able to travel back?).
But if it hasn't caught up, how come their reality is "markedly different"?
This is a classic screenwriting short cut. This is the writer forcing the story to serve his master (director, producer or simply his own ego) rather than letting the story play itself out based on the setup and the characters. This is just a plot device not meant to be thought about too much... well, that's fine in a Britney Spears movie, but we're talking Bradbury here. This is a science fiction story. Science fiction stories are meant to be thought about. That's the whole point! They're not about ray-guns and futuristic technology. They're metaphors for things in OUR lives. They're about people, not technology. The technology is just a tool.
Of course, having seen the horrible Timecop, I know just how much Peter Hyams cares about logic and people in his movies, so this is not a particularly surprising turn of events.
However, I will not be spending a dime to see this movie. This is something I will download and proudly announce to the world that I did so just to protest the butchering of the story.
I would gladly shell out $10 to see this story on the big screen, if it was done by ANYONE other than Hyams, who seems to have a particular fetish for destroying Science Fiction as a genre (Capricorn One, Outland, 2010, Timecop, The Relic, End of Days). This guy hasn't made a single tolerable SciFi movie, and THIS is the guy filming one of the great sci-fi short stories of all time?
-- This sig for rent.
The author of the original novel is usually credited ambiguously as "story by" or "based on." Actual writing for the film is done by an army of screenwriters and script doctors, who will receive little credits (if they are lucky!). The only reason the studio gives credit to the author of the novel is so that they won't be involved in legal troubles. Well-known writers with a household name also have added value for the marketing of the film.
When you see a film based on a novel, don't expect to see what you read in the original novel --because no film director can beat what your imagination can create. Films hit your vision. Novels speak to your heart.
There have been very, very few. Francois Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 for example. 2001 for another (even if you don't consider it "based" on the 2001 novel, it was based on the short story "The Sentinel").
And actually I don't even mind them changing the story, as long as they do a good job. Like I think Blade Runner is an amazing movie. Yes, it's a completely different story than the book, but I don't think the story in the book would have translated into a movie that well. But the recent fad to turn brilliant, intellectual science fiction novels into action movies is just depressing.