“What if…?” conjecturing always makes good fodder for story tellers. Take a simple concept, preferably something historical and alter just one decision or action and all of a sudden you have a whole new outcome and situation. The key is you have to do it well or it just comes off as half-assed hackery.

Which brings me to A Sound of Thunder, the story of an time travel agency in the near future whose tour participants unintenionally alter the unfolding of history by stepping on a single butterfly. Ben Kingsley slums as the owner of the travel agency and Edward Burns brings his near emotionless acting to this mash-up of Timeline and Jurassic Park.

The Poster

It’s alright, but reminds me too much of the one-sheet for the Richard Gere vehicle The Mothman Prophecies. It’s just a butterfly and honestly it doesn’t look too dissimilar to the butterfly paintings and such that adorned my grandmother’s house. That’s not a great memory to invoke if you’re pushing a sci-fi action flick.

The Trailer

Hi-friggin-larious, if you ask me. We get a brief setup that this story is set in 2054 Chicago and that Kingsley needs to send Burns and his crew off on this mission. Something goes wrong and they have to try to fix the mistakes before their own reality is wiped out. So in addition to the movies referenced above we’re also throwing Back to the Future into the mix now.

The thing that really struck me in the trailer is just how ridiculous Kingsley looks. With his white pompadour and little stripe of a goatee the Unintentional Comedy Scale may need repair work. He looks like an inhabitant of Metaluna from This Island Earth. I keep waiting for him to communicate via interociter.

The Website

The coolest thing about the website is that when you launch the Flash-based portion you can see the building I work in (it’s the short brown one infront of the tall red one). Other than that it’s pretty boring. Obviously Warner Bros. didn’t alot a huge budget for a late-summer B-grade castoff. Check it out only for more pictures of Kingley’s haircut.

Overall

This sucks. Movie might be entertaining escapism but I’m not interested at all in finding out after reviewing this campaign.