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A Sound of Thunder is based on a Ray Bradbury short story of the same name, and is set in a future where time travel is not only possible, it’s become quite the tourist attraction. One firm, Time Safari, Inc, specializes in offering big-game hunters and other adventurers the opportunity to track and kill the biggest game that ever walked the Earth: dinosaurs.

Of course, as any reader or viewer of time-travel stories knows, time travel is a tricky business; the destruction of one flower or blade of grass, the death of one insect that didn't die before can alter the timeline. Time Safari guards the past by only allowing its patrons to hunt and kill dinosaurs that were about to die anyway, and the hunters must only walk on special anti-grav pathways that float above the floor of the primordial jungles so as not to inadvertently change the course of history and, ultimately, their own time.

And so it is that Time Safari’s top scout, Travis Ryer, takes a group back into time to hunt the biggest prey of all, the Tyrannosaurus Rex, and what has become close to a routine trip goes horribly awry. One of the hunters, a preening, macho type who annoyed the party and Ryer with his boastful claim on taking down the T-Rex all by himself, instead panics at the sight of the mighty beast and turns tail and runs...off the path and straight into the jungle. The group return to their own time, and find the timeline has changed dramatically, and not at all for the better. Upon searching the panicked hunter, Ryer finds a dead butterfly on one of the man’s shoes. A butterfly that had not died before had been killed by the fear-crazed time traveler, and the ripples it created through the timeline are spreading into the future.

Those familiar with the story know it ended, rather dramatically, one sentence after this point. This being a studio production, however, it needs to pad out the tale to longer than the 30 minutes that above scenario would take. So in the film, Ryer and the inventor of the time-travel technology must try and repair the damage to the timeline before the altered history takes away their ability to do so.

A Sound of Thunder is currently scheduled for release on March 11, 2005, and is likely being positioned by Warner Bros as an entry at the beginning of the earlier-every-year summer season. Given the action elements of the film; the special-effects bonanza that the sequences in the Jurassic period offers, not to mention possible futuristic landscapes; and the alternate-history aspects that provide a thoughtful foundation to the gee-whiz CG components; this seems a great candidate for an adrenaline-rush harbinger of the blockbuster season. (Stephanie Star Smith/BOP)

Vital statistics for A Sound of Thunder Main Cast Edward Burns, Ben Kingsley, Catherine McCormack Supporting Cast Jemima Rooper, Wilfried Hochholdinger, August Zirner, Corey Johnson, Andrew Blanchard Director Peter Hyams Screenwriter Thomas Dean Donnelly, Clement Enlatarne, Joshua Oppenheimer, Gregory Poirier, Ray Bradbury (short story) Distributor Warner Bros. Trailer Click Here for Trailer Official Site http://asoundofthunder.warnerbros.com/ Rating PG-13 Running Time 103 minutes Screen Count 816 Talent in red has entry in The Big Picture

Comparison films for A Sound of Thunder
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Matrix, The	4/2/99	27.78	33.10	2849	9751.00	11133.0	171.38	204.23	5.82
Total Recall	6/1/90	25.53	36.47	2060	12393.00	17033.0	119.39	170.59	4.68
Twelve Monkeys	1/5/96	13.84	18.88	1533	9028.00	11846.7	57.14	77.95	4.10
Thirteenth Floor, The	5/28/99	3.33	3.96	1815	1835.00	2095.1	11.80	14.06	2.76