t's been a long time coming, but Ray Bradbury's classic story finally reaches the screen Sept. 2. With a budget in excess of $100 million, special effects are lavish. Somewhere along the way, however, the title's meaning has been lost, as has the human drama. The result is a powerful idea believably visualized by the usually reliable Hyams (Outland, Capricorn One, 2010), despite a surprising lack of compelling characters.
In the original, a tourist buys a trip back to dinosaur times. He is warned not to leave the path, because any alteration of the past may affect the course of evolution. The roar of the dinosaur is like "a sound of thunder." When the safari returns to the present, he notices certain subtle differences. Why are some words now spelled differently? And isn't there something slightly off about the color and texture of the air? There is mud on his shoe, and in the mud is a single smashed butterfly, the result of a brief step off the path. The safari's leader curses him for changing millions of years of history, then raises a rifle. The tourist begs for mercy but the damage has been done. He hears the rifle cock and shuts his eyes, waiting for the explosion. The last line of the story is, "There was a sound of thunder."
In this version, entrepreneur Charles Hatton (Ben Kingsley, with Jeff Morrow's high white hair from This Island Earth) sells time safaris to big-game hunters. But one leaves the path and crushes a butterfly, initiating massive changes in future history. A determined guide named Travis (Edward Burns) puts together a team that includes Sonia Rand (Catherine MacCormack), the
beautiful scientist who developed time-hopping, and takes them back to the same coordinates to correct the mistake. But more mistakes ensue, leaving the world in a horrifying state. Is it possible to save the future before civilization devolves into primordial chaos?
If Bradbury's happy, we're happy
Many have wanted to film Bradbury's tale since the 1950s. Failing that, some borrowed from the concept or simply ripped it off. The Last Dinosaur, a '70s ABC-TV movie, starred Richard Boone as a big-game hunter who's also hunting a Tyrannosaurus Rex. More recently, the title of The Butterfly Effect is an obvious reference to one of the best-known short stories in science fiction, whose publication caused ripples in and out of the literature that have yet to be assessed.
Bradbury claims to be delighted with this production after so many false starts. In 1991 a prospective director told him, "Let's get rid of the butterfly." This is the device that triggers the story, reprinted in more than 80 anthologies, with every illustration featuring a butterfly. Faced with the prospect of altering the source material so fundamentally that his story could not
possibly evolve from it, Bradbury opted instead to get rid of the director.
Here the protagonist returns to a moment before the butterfly incident, hoping to avoid the cause of the temporal disturbance. But the return creates new problems that must also be corrected, until the world seems beyond repair. The encounter with the dinosaur is shown in several variations, as the mission is continually rewound and retried. The film also provides for another spectacular effect, that of the time wave itself, seen sweeping across the world like
a transparent scythe that remakes everything in its path. Does the hero succeed? Is the future restored? It would be a sin to tell. But the ongoing revisions of reality, and the increasingly desperate attempts to right the wrongs of the past, provide set pieces involving sometimes impressive digital effects.
Except for Kingsley, the casting is lackluster and the characters all but ignored in dramatic terms. Perhaps a few dollars more for actors we have learned to trust and a little less for CGI would have made the difference. As for a satisfying conclusion, the original ends with the punishment of the party responsible, however unwittingly. In this film the villain is clearly Kingsley, who chooses profits over a biological safeguard that would have prevented the whole thing. Does he hear a well-deserved sound of thunder at the end? The answer is in theaters now, part of a thought-provoking but curiously flat cautionary tale about responsibility and consequences.
