The 2005 science fiction thriller film A Sound of Thunder is based on the 1952 short story of the same name by Ray Bradbury.

Two years before this film’s release, I visited Ray Bradbury in his home and called to his attention that I was wearing an ankle bracelet with a blue butterfly. Ray said, “Well, good for you.” He said that someone who may have been initially supposed to direct the film had said, “How about we lose the butterfly?” Ray said, kind of laughing, “So you know what we did? We FIRED the son of a bitch!”

The butterfly is key to the whole story and is a vivid and unforgettable image near the end. I have moderated Ray Bradbury’s official message board for over twenty years and can attest that the butterfly is the single most remembered image in any of Bradbury’s work. I am pleased to say the butterfly is very much in evidence in the film although sadly there it is not blue.

When the film at last came out, I asked the manager of the local theater whether he would feature it. He said no, it used crummy 1950s technology, with actors in the foreground acting scared of dinosaurs being back projected behind them. A review said, “Wait till it comes on SyFy, and then watch something else.” As a result I avoided the film for twenty-one years but felt I should try to watch every adaptation of Bradbury’s work and so finally watched this. If I can watch a four-hour miniseries in Russian of which I don’t understand a word, I can sit through this. Naturally I started with expectations at rock bottom.

I don’t know where the theater manager got his information about the special effects but it was dead wrong. The dinosaurs and other creatures were not Jurassic Park quality, but were sufficiently scary and certainly interacted with the actors. If you are up for seeing people attacked by various walking, swimming, and flying beasts, you will not be too disappointed. Other violence occurs in the form of shooting of people and animals.

The only well-known actor in this is Ben Kingsley, who plays Charles Hatton, the owner of a time traveling company which advertises safaris for hunters to shoot beasts of prehistory. As in the original story, the travelers are instructed to stay on a special path which does not disturb existing plants or animals of the past. If all goes right, they then shoot a dinosaur which the company has determined is about to die minutes later anyway. Thing is, in the story it is a different dinosaur every time. In the film they repeatedly shoot the same dinosaur, which makes no sense and is obviously a cheap trick to save on special effects.

The film takes a lot of liberties with the story, adding characters not worth describing and sometimes silly situations to pad it out to feature film length. It is not particularly well done, but it was not as bad as the theater manager had led me to believe. I recommend reading the original story and then see the film if you have two hours to waste.