Last Saturday, we left Travis Ryer thinking that his company, which hosts time safaris, had narrowly avoided a disaster. Unfortunately, in Sound of Thunder‘s universe, time alterations don’t happen all at once. They come in waves, and the first wave hits while he is sleeping.

Ryer wakes up to find that his clock is no longer working — but time itself seems to be working just fine as he’s watching the weather channel; just a funny little plot hole I noticed. However, he isn’t concerned about the time. He’s noticing the temperature, which is unseasonably warm. He also notices that his fern, which he has struggled to keep alive, is now strong and healthy. Just little things.

But then as he walks to work, he sees plants growing through cement walls. Now, all of this should have been enough for Ryer to realize there’s a problem. But our protagonist isn’t quite there yet. However, when it comes time for his next safari, he and the team arrive to find that the allosaurus, the movie’s discount T-rex, is already stuck in the tar pit. Then, moments later, the volcano in the distance explodes. Ryer and Jenny narrowly escape the blast, and the crew finally realizes that something is very wrong.

Paging Dr. Rand…

Upon returning from the ruined safari, the adventurers ask the AI, TAMMY, why it sent them to the wrong place in time. TAMMY insists that it placed them exactly where they were supposed to go. This is enough to convince Derris, the government regulator sent to monitor the company’s activities, to shut the company down. This might seem like a necessary measure, but it’s a poor decision. Nobody knows how to operate the AI time machine, so how is shutting the company down going to help anything? Anyway, Ryer knows exactly who to contact: Dr. Rand, the woman who built TAMMY. He now realizes that the safari changed something during the previous trip, but he doesn’t know what.

Unfortunately, Dr. Rand is more snarky than helpful. She asks Ryer the time, and seeing that twenty-four hours have passed, points to her window and shows Ryer the next time wave.

This was ridiculous for multiple reasons. First of all, how did she know precisely when the next time wave would arrive? Secondly, how lucky was it for Ryer to show up at the right moment? Thirdly, this twenty-four-hour ticking clock is never mentioned again, so what was the point in bringing it up in the first place? Every wave after this shows up at random.

Lazy details mar otherwise plausible scenes

But Dr. Rand’s actions are far more bizarre than any of these details. Why did she choose to lock herself in her apartment? Her fellow tenants blame her for the out-of-control plant life because her apartment has an oversized greenhouse for some reason. Travis has to trick the woman into letting him in by pretending to be a delivery guy who was conveniently delivering her fertilizer.

I like this movie overall, but some of the details used to rush the plot are just plain lazy. Furthermore, why didn’t she run straight to the company, to Travis, or to Hatton, screaming that she knew what they’d done and then offer to fix the issue? She could’ve saved the plot a lot of time. Her choice to hide in her apartment also makes her unlikable as a character. Rather than fighting to save the world, she’s instantly resigned to her fate until Travis shows up.

Not just plants, but insects

After Dr. Rand’s convenient time wave, she and Tavis hear a scream. They rush to the door, and when one of them opens it, they see a woman crawling with bugs. The woman falls over dead as these strange beetles invade the greenhouse. They start to crawl on our heroes, and I can only assume they are poisonous because the unfortunate tenant died. However, our heroes only seem to be annoyed by the pests, very annoyed.

Travis runs to a nearby water hose and begins spraying the beetles off Dr. Rand, but in the process, he also shorts out a power outlet, which just so happens to be beside some conveniently placed oxygen tanks. Travis realizes his error, so he grabs Dr. Rand, and the two jump out of the window before the doctor’s apartment explodes.

Now on a regular day, this would’ve been the end of our heroes because Dr. Rand’s apartment is near the top of a rather tall building. But luckily, a tree has grown during the previous time wave, and it catches them. Lazy — I mean, lucky.

Has the theme of the film changed?

This was by far the dumbest sequence in the movie, but it also raises a question. Why in the world is a movie about time travel turning into a climate disaster flick? Well, as Travis and Dr. Rand are leaving her apartment building, she starts to explain. It turns out that time in this movie has no correlation with events but rather with evolution. It seems that the butterfly effect only alters biological material and the weather. Each wave represents an evolutionary stage. The first wave changes the weather. The next wave changes the plants. The third wave changes “simple” life — of course, all life is anything but simple. And the next several waves will affect the larger animals until the last wave changes humanity into a completely different species.

Problems with the movie’s logic

The first real problem is that, by the movie’s own logic, this scenario shouldn’t have taken place to begin with. Remember, a volcano is set to erupt five minutes after the Allosaurus dies, so everything in the area is immediately wiped out, including the butterfly the audience later learns Middleton stepped on during the botched time safari. There’s simply no way that butterfly would’ve had time to escape the explosion; therefore, it couldn’t have eaten anything important or given birth to anything that could be expected to survive. Therefore, killing the butterfly shouldn’t have affected anything, which was the entire reason the time safari company had chosen to kill something right before a volcanic explosion. Their own precautions would’ve prevented this movie from happening.

The only possible argument the writers could’ve used to justify how the butterfly’s death changed the future would be this: Because Middleton brought the butterfly back, 1.3 grams of matter were missing from Earth’s history, and this altered the entire chain of evolution. But that matter was dead. So, what could it have changed?

However, there’s a larger problem with combining time paradoxes and the evolutionary process, and we’ll discuss this problem next Saturday.

Here are the first three parts of my seven-part review of 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.

A Sound of Thunder: Comparing the film with the short story What’s the same? What’s changed? What works and what doesn’t? I compliment the writers for constructing a scenario where it is actually conceivable for time travelers to enter the past without altering it.

and

A Sound of Thunder: Time travel for fun and profit — and tragedy. In this third part of my review, I look at the adaptations leading up to the climax — the ones that worked and the ones that didn’t. We learn that expedition leader Ryer is hoping to use his time travel trips to help bring extinct species back to life.