While reviewing Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder,” I noted that this short story classic suffers from a fundamental problem with its premise: the butterfly effect. The butterfly effect is the idea that the tiniest change in the past will dramatically alter the present. Something as simple as stepping on a butterfly can destroy the current timeline.

The problem is that the changes attributed to the butterfly in the short story are arbitrary. There is no simple way to figure out how the alterations in Bradbury’s tale are connected to the deceased butterfly. To be fair, Bradbury is forced to remain somewhat ambiguous because of his medium, the short story. Even so, the butterfly effect is such an extreme premise that even the logistics concerning how we can enter the past become distracting questions as the story progresses.

The movie A Sound of Thunder (2005) has the advantage of more time available to explore the idea. But in my opinion, all the time in every timeline couldn’t have saved either of them.

Smarter choices about the time safari

That said, the movie begins with the same basic concept as the short story. A company has built what it calls a “time safari.” On this safari, wealthy businessmen pay to hunt a dangerous animal from the past. In the short story, the creature is a T. rex, but for some reason, the movie chose to go with a creature that looks exactly like a T. rex but is called something else. For the purposes of this review, I’m still going to refer to the beast as a T. rex.

The movie writers make the smart choice of going into a little more detail regarding how the time safari was actually built. Last Saturday, I mentioned the obvious problem of how the company was supposed to enter the past to build this safari without changing it. The writers address this problem by introducing an AI named TAMI. TAMI is essentially able to look into the past without altering it. The scientists using the AI are able to pinpoint the place in history they want without entering the past themselves. The details are still vague, but the idea is that the time safari was put together before anyone ever set foot in the past.

And instead of a metal hoverboard used by the group to travel to the desired location, a translucent bridge made from some kind of energy is ejected from a wormhole opened up by the AI. This bridge is able to maneuver around the terrain for a certain distance. Also, when it comes to the T. rex, instead of having a random tree fall on the beast, the company chose to shoot an animal that was about to find itself stuck in a tar pit minutes before a volcano explodes.

All of these details create the sense that the scientists working for the time safari company are extremely cautious, so it’s a little easier to believe that no one has altered the past prior to the events of the story.

Compliments where compliments are due but… the graphics! The sound track!

I want to stop here and compliment the writers for taking the time to construct a scenario where it is actually conceivable for time travelers to enter the past without altering it in a world where the butterfly effect is in play. Clearly, some thought was put into the story’s setup.

Now, at this point, I must say that the graphics for this film are simply awful, and the music score is just as terrible. At times, it feels like the movie’s entire musical score was played on an electric keyboard from a local retail store. And, sadly, while the actors aren’t terrible, some of them are… let’s just say a little inexperienced. But when it comes to these sorts of details, I’m a little more sympathetic, at least when it comes to reviewing films. Sadly, these details can alienate a viewer from a movie, but they shouldn’t because such matters usually aren’t within the production team’s control.

Why writing is a good criterion for films

This is a very low-budget movie, which is sad. Had the writers and production team had more financing to work with, I do think the movie would’ve turned out a lot better. I feel this way because, if the writers were willing to take so much time making the story’s setup more believable, chances are, they could’ve done even more if they’d had additional resources. That’s why writing is such a good criterion for films. I believe it more accurately reflects the amount of effort a studio was willing to put in.

To demonstrate, compare A Sound of Thunder with the Terminator franchise. The first and second films are classics, and the fourth film is underrated to say the least. But what about the rest of them? It’s clear that the writers of this movie read Ray Bradbury’s work and asked the very same questions I presented in the previous review: If the butterfly effect is in play, how does the company find the right place in time, construct the bridge, and locate the right animal, all without altering the past? They asked these questions and answered them.

A Sound of Thunder vs. the Terminator films

But given some of the clear plot holes in the later Terminator films, it’s clear that the writers of those movies barely watched the previous installments. There’s no thought given to continuity, and they don’t even stick to consistent theory about time travel.

In the first two films, time paradoxes are created to explain how the future is interacting with the present. In the third, fate — whatever the writers think that is — is directing events in such a way so that everything in the timeline maintains a consistent course. But then the fifth movie decides that multiverses can come into play, and in the sixth film, fate introduces a brand new John after the first one has been killed, which ends up creating an infinite regress of Terminators, Kyle Reeses, and Johns running up and down the timeline.

That franchise is a mess! And this is because the writers simply didn’t care. They didn’t think about continuity or their own time travel theory. Despite the enormous budgets, the writers were lazy, and it shows. That’s why I’d argue that, despite the awful graphics, despite the awful — and I mean awful — soundtrack, A Sound of Thunder is already a better movie than most of the Terminator franchise, and that’s just after looking at the film’s setup.

I’ll continue covering A Sound of Thunder next Saturday.

Here’s the first part of my three-part review of SoT: A Sound of Thunder: Does the famous butterfly effect make sense? I am going to look at the 1952 short story first — the premises and the plot — before tackling the 2005 film. I think “A Sound of Thunder” has remained popular partially because the butterfly effect is a unique idea if nothing else.