Slashdot Mirror
A Sound of Thunder
blamanj writes "One of the great sci-fi short stories, Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder is scheduled to be released on film next month. Links to the trailers (QT, Real, WMP) can be found here. The original story prefigured chaos theory in its 'small changes, large effects' premise. Indeed, when I first heard the term 'butterfly theory,' I assumed it was based on Bradbury's story. Unlike the original, however, the film won't be touching on dystopian politics, but appears to have been turned into a 'Jurassic Park'-style creature feature. Sigh. Oh, well, we can hope that the new Fahrenheit 451 will be treated with a bit more respect."
The on-tape version of this story was one of my favorite tapes for a long time. It featured truly excellent acting and sound effects and was better than any movie I can imagine. The horror in the voices of the travellers having returned and discovered what they had done still sends a cold shiver down my back.
I found a copy at my local library, definatly something to look up before it gets picked up by the movie fan masses.
What post? The one you're carrying inside your rusty innards!
Not much info there yet, but might be worth bookmarking for the future.
Treehouse of Horror V
The episode is called "Time and Punishment" and features Homer repairing a toaster which then sends him back and forth through time. Each time he comes back he's messed things up worse than the last.
"I've gone back in time to when dinosaurs weren't just confined to zoos." - Homer
Visceral Psyche Films
You guys are gonna have to wait until 1st quarter 2005 to see this one as the release was pushed back by Warner Bros.
I never read the story but I saw the TV version of this story on a Ray Bradbury theater episode. The trailer is mostly correct in the beginning. There is a company that figured out time travel and uses it to go back in time to offer people the chance to hunt creatures they could never hunt before. Everything is strictly controlled, and they do kill a T-rex. In the story, the T-rex is sickly, and was going to die anyway, which is the point, to preserve the time line.
However the guy who hired the company to go on this expedition stepped off that path, a special path designed to isolate the time travellers from all the other organisms and not cause damage to the timeline.
When the travelers get back, they are in a whole new world. The company is still there, the people are too. However, in this world, Germany won the second world war and the third reich is in power.
The story ends with the leader of the expedition locating the butterfly on the shoe of the client who stepped off the path. In the show, which I'm not sure was in the story, the leader puts a bullet between the eyes of the client for basically messing up the time line. Again I'm not sure that last action was in the story.
And that's it. That's all that's needed for the lesson in the timeline. This crap WB turned it into is just another hollywood suspense action thriller with the same damn plot as all the others. Blah.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
If you _really_ stretched the story you could make it last 10 minutes. So expecting a 2 hour film to do more than take the story as a starting point (which it does seem to do) is asking a bit much.
My Journal