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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."
Here's what the Man himself has to say.
Yes!
This is awesome! I have been waiting for a sci-fi remake of Sound of Music! Finaly!
No, i don't like sigs...
Considering what they did to I, Robot, I've got a bad feeling about this.
See there friend, if you flatten me silly, there will be absolutely no way to tell if you've changed the future irreparably! As the changes you've wrought have taken place way way way long time ago in the superpast, well before you and the rest of your crazy civilization were concieved and born, these changes existed before you went back in time to stomp on me and maybe change the entire history of forever!
Who knows! All I know is that I'm a butterfly and that I like nectar. Yum nectar!
(effa why eye, Mozart in Mirrorshades was better)
ALL HAIL THE BEAST THAT ASCENDETH FROM THE PIT WITH HIS CUTE WIDDLE NOSE =^o.o^=
Quick summary: Story takes place in 2055 where time travel is possible and occurs on a daily, regulated basis. Time Safari Inc. offers hunting safaris to any point in the past. You pick an animal, they give you big guns, send you back in time and you shoot your animal dead. Hunters are kept on anti-gravity paths in order to prevent them from changing history through the so-called butterfly effect (stomping on a blade of grass may wipe out Texas in the future, etc.)
The actual story is simple. A hunter goes back on a T-Rex safari, panics and runs off the path. He kills a butterfly in the process. The safari returns and finds the future changed for the worse. The end.
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.
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.
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
Well, Harlan Ellison wouldn't like it at all!
But at least I could read it again.From the story:
TYME SEFARI INC.
SEFARIS TU ANY YEER EN THE PAST.
YU NAIM THE ANIMALL.
WEE TAEK YU THAIR.
YU SHOOT ITT.
Wow! Bradbury predicted IRC!
The latest Slashdot meme.