A Sound of Chunder

Ben Kinglsey. SIR Ben Kingsley. He was Gandhi. The man was knighted because he’s such a fine actor. Did he lose a bet? Does someone have pictures of him “with” another species? Is his agent just really, really bad? How the hell did he choose to make this movie? This movie is awful in more ways than I can count.

OK, quick plot outline. Someone has figured out how to make time travel work, Ben Kingsley is the guy who made it profitable. He runs a company that takes high paying customers back in time to hunt dinosaurs. One of them kills a butterfly, and the course of history is changed forever, unless our hero, Edward Burns can go back in time one last time and save the world. Not a terribly novel plot, but not an awful one on which to base a 90 minute movie.

OK, now the bad parts. One of the requirements of a spectorqular film is bad science. I’m not sure this one qualifies, because there’s not bad science, there’s NO science. I mean, I’m no Einstein, and this movie is just asinine. I’ll give a few examples, but this review would be 10 pages if I listed all of them.

First, the dinosaur they kill is one that will die in minutes anyway as its trapped in a swamp, and mere minutes from being consumed in a fiery volcanic eruption, so if they shoot him, it’ll have no effect on future evolution. Fair enough, but won’t the butterfly die in the same explosion, too? And, just how did they find this perfect dinosaur to kill?

Second, they realize something is amiss when they go back to their usual time (they kill the same dinosaur time after time) with another group of customers, and things are different. But if they go back to minutes before the butterfly is killed in the previous jump back, how can things be different?

Lastly, the impact of the dead butterfly in present time doesn’t happen all at once, it happens over time. Huh? And it manifests itself in “time waves” that look like metaphysical tsunamis that physically knock people over. And each successive wave changes more advanced creatures. At first, its just plants, then its bugs, then its mammals, and the last wave is humans. What??

Does anybody read these scripts?

Another criteria for spectorqularity is bad CG. This movie is all about bad CG. I haven’t seen worse CG since the “Money for Nothing” video in the 80s. Seriously, I think I could have made more realistic creatures in Microsoft Paint. And its not just a couple places where you really notice it. It’s the entire movie. Imagine the same amount of CG as “The Phantom Menace”, with the quality of “Driven” and you begin to understand how bad this is. And on top of that, there are obvious blue screen shots all over. Isn’t that technology pretty well mastered by now?

At the end of the day, this is really a 3 cube movie, since for as crappy as it is, it isn’t that much fun. But, because of the horrendous CG, I have to bump it up a cube. I really can’t describe how bad it is. It is the worst CG I have ever seen, and its everywhere. I challenge you to find worse.

Things to watch for:

+ The first two times they show an exterior shot of the Time Safari building, the same cars go by at the same times in the same order. Jesus, all this CG, and they couldn’t even mix up the cars?

+ The cabs that bear a striking similarity to the Johnny Cabs from “Total Recall”

+ The giant, bulletproof, ape-headed lizards that sleep upside down like bats. I’m not kidding, I couldn’t make this stuff up.