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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."
I wonder about all these "remakes" where the message of the book is erased (I even include "I, Robot" in that...). How many people will not read books because they saw the films and think they know what they were about, desite the films being sanitised, pro-corporatist and watered-down?
Instead of the hero returning and blowing his brains out because everything is misspelt and someone else won the election.... they decide in the movie version to hey, have a movie, with stuff in it.
:)
Those.... BASTARDS.
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Great, now a title like this rings the bell of M. Moore instead of R. Bradbury. Great indeed.
It's like when I saw in a DVD review of TRON that it was the Matrix of the eighties. I shouldn't comment on this further.
I just guess today's bright minds can't take the burden of even just 10-20 years of cultural heritage. Let alone history.
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This has been my rule of thumb for movies adapted from books (most movies, BTW). I will admit that there are a very few exceptions (usually where the book was adapted from the movie - Star Wars), but the vast majority of the time the book is better. Even when they do a really good job on the movie, like with LotR or The Princess Bride, there's still no comparison with the book. Don't get me wrong, I love those movies & can't think of many practical ways they could have been improved (three movies each for FotR, TTT, and RotK...), but IMO the books are still much better. I know a lot of you will start yelling "Apples and Oranges" at me, but I guess that's kind of my point. With very few exceptions I like oranges better than apples. I honestly think that books are a better form of entainment media than movies. Not that movies aren't great, but books are better.
I also want to say that I don't think there shouldn't be movie adaptations of books - like I said above I love the LotR movies. But as I am something of a bookworm (never would've guessed, huh?), it really bugs me when Hollywood takes a book and totally screws it over. And all too often that's what they do. Just a couple recent examples: I, Robot. That movie just really ticked me off. It would have been all right (well, the movie still would have sucked, but I wouldn't have cared so much) if they had just come up with their own title for the movie, and not had any connection to Asimov or his stories. He just had to be spinning in his grave over that movie. For those that don't know, I, Robot was a collection of short stories and essays by Asimov; and one of the things he makes very clear was that the whole reason he started writing Robot stories was because he hated the cliched plot "Man builds robot. Robot goes crazy and kills everyone." What's the plot in the movie?
One last example of a book Hollywood screwed over recently: Cheaper by the Dozen. Remake of a movie adapted from a stageplay adapted from book. The first movie and the stageplay were done well. The 2003 movie never should have been made. Cheaper by the Dozen is a comedy revolving around two points: a large family (12 kids), and the Father working as an efficiency expert consultant for large corporations. He is not, I repeat NOT , a football coach. Hollywood just blew away half of the premise.
Like I said, I don't think Hollywood should stop making book adaptations, but they should stay true to the book. If you don't like the book's plot, then don't make a movie claiming to be an adaptation of it, when less than half the movie is related to the book, or worse goes completly against the book.
All right, rant mode off...
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Oh, you mean this?
<Sigh>... Why is it people are always remaking movies, is Hollywood not inventive to come up with new plots itself? (Yes, that was rhetorical.)
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He didn't commit suicide. If the "hero" was killed it was because the hunter shot him. Although it never says anything except that there was a sound of thunder. Wich could be a poetic way of saying gunshot but that is not clear. Nor needs to be clear. Maybe the hunter killed himself after all he is the one who objected most in the story to the guy now in power.
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What book? "A sound of thunder" is a cheesy 2 page short story where a guy goes back in time, steps on a butterfly, and rewrites all of history.
For a 2 pager, it's a good story. But sheeit, get a grip on it people, it's not the greatest story I've read by a long shot.
I'm surprised anyone thought it was worth a movie. It was barely worth the Simpsons spoof.
I have a feeling what happened was, someone wrote a script about going back in time to hunt dinosaurs, suits noticed the similarities in plots, and just bought the rights to the story rather than risk a copyright suit down the road.
I like Bradbury and all, but this just seems like a goofy short story to get worked up about.
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The great thing about Ray Bradbury is his amazing ability to captivate with simple short stories. He doesn't even describe what happens at the end of this story, it just ends with the chilling line, "There was a sound of thunder." There's no way even a faithful short film adaptation can capture that magic. In a feature-length film, I'd be surprised if there were any magic left at all. Oh, well. At least the first half of the trailer was enjoyable.
I hope they do better than they did with Robert Heinlein's classic Starship Troopers.
I love good science fiction, and constantly wonder why it's so rare at the movies. Phillip K. Dick's stories have done better (Blade Runner). I liked Gattica, as a thought provoking and cautionary tale of technology bent by society and politics, but the Hollywood touch renders most science fiction into a festering mound of low-brow special effects poop.
Why does Hollywood usually wait until science fiction authors have died before converting their work into a movie? I have a couple of theories:
1) The author has seen other SF movie adaptations, and thus adopted the policy, "Over my dead body."
2) Hollywood wants to lessen the chances of a lawsuit based on misrepresentation, libel, etc.
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Simply stated, a really good writer can write a really good book ...
along comes a MEDIOCRE Hollywood writer / director / producer and turns the book into a mediocre movie.
It's all about talent levels. Bradbury wrote a good short story. But the writer(s) who expanded it to movie length probably were NOT in the same league as him.
Well, it's kinda difficult to make a short story of maybe 1500 words stretch out into a 2 hour feature film without adding something.
;-)
Unfortunately, to me, the film looks like an amalgamation of Paycheck, Timeline, The Butterfly Effect, and The Day After Tomorrow. Oh yes, and Jurassic Park.
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"Well, it's kinda difficult to make a short story of maybe 1500 words stretch out into a 2 hour feature film without adding something."
Funny though, usually Hollywood uses the fact that in adapting a *novel* they have to figure out what to omit.
One wonders if someone were to make a movie out of something in-between short story and novel size would Hollywood get it right.
My guess is that length has little or nothing to do with it. "I, Robot" had a dozen short stories (which were related in such a way that you could mix and match them all you wanted) but for the life of me I couldn't figure out what the movie and the stories had in common other than the "Three Laws of Robotics", Asimov's name, and the word "Positronic".
I enjoyed the movie, but re-read the stories just to verify that they were not used for the movie. I really think the people in Hollywood are just too self centered to use something from the 50's. They want the name recognition, the guarantee that a million or so sci-fi fans will turn out, and other than that, the flexibility to let the dozen or so hollywood stars of the moment play themselves one more time. There is no Will Smith-like character in "I, Robot", so toss the stories in the trash and keep the title.
Like some operating systems I know, this formula is old and BORING and not worth the premium price asked for it by the "developers".