I don't understand the vitriolic and negative reviews. Were those people expecting an informative documentary like on Discovery channel? And I don't think Ray Bradbury would be upset at the treatment his short story received. His story was fantasy, well-written and clever, and putting that on the screen would be a challenge. I think the writers, producers, director and actors have done a pretty-good job of it.

From memory, Bradbury's story ends when it is discovered that evolution has changed because of a tiny alteration in a time-travel incident. But that would make the movie 37 minutes long, so the modern writers have to find a remedy, and stretch it out to a reasonable length.

Ryer (Burns) knows what has to be done and he has to get the inventor of the TAMI machine, Sonia Rand, (Catherine McCormack) to help, but New York is now a jungle and there are hordes of ape-lizards, and ape-bats and nasty eagles too. They have to get to a university with a working particle accelerator. What a challenge, through the flooded subway and always pursued by monsters.

Suspend ones reasoning, just take it for a way-out fantasy. And it looks better when watched for a second or third time.

The story is good, the characters are well-defined, the acting is good, (especially that of a support character Eccles (William Armstrong) who is absolutely terrified),and there is some memorable dialogue, so I've given it a 7.

For once, Catherine McCormack doesn't even get kissed!

It is a real shame as A Sound of Thunder did have good potential with an interesting concept. The problem was that it executed it badly. I will say that Edward Burns is good in the lead role, but that is all there is that is good, the rest of the film is a mess. The rest of the acting is poor with a mix of overacting and underacting, on the most part the latter. The worst case was Ben Kingsley, which was all the more disappointing as he is a very talented actor(outstanding in Gandhi),but it is really embarrassing to see him overdo it so badly and struggling to give any credibility to his lines. I can kind of understand the last point though as the dialogue is absurd, it was difficult to not laugh out loud at how toe-curlingly cheesy a lot of the lines were, so it was no wonder that the actors couldn't do anything with it. As said also the story and concept could have been really interesting in the right hands, sadly however nothing excites and the concept is introduced and told in such an outlandish manner it doesn't even make sense. There is nothing whatsoever engaging about the characters, they only annoy or bore you here, and A Sound of Thunder is choppily edited and has some of the worst green screen and special effects I have ever seen. All in all, a film with potential that went completely pear-shaped. 2/10 Bethany Cox

In 2055, in Chicago, a company specialized in time travel and owned by the powerful and wealthy Charles Hatton (Ben Kingsley) organizes safaris for tycoons in the prehistoric era. The team is leaded by Dr. Travis Ryer (Edward Burns) and the jump is programmed by a computer. When something is changed in the past, the time waves affect the life in the present days and Travis and his crew, with the support of the inventor of the computer, Sonia Rand (Catherine McCormack),try to find a way to fix the problem caused in the past.

When I saw the User rating of 3.9 and the bad reviews in IMDb, I questioned myself if it would be a worth movie to see. Fortunately I saw it, since I liked this underrated Ray Bradbury tale. Certainly it is a movie of special effects, since the story happens simultaneously in our future and in the past, with catastrophic results in 2055 when an accident happens in the past. This movie is not a masterpiece, will never dispute a major award, but it is a good entertainment and the story recalled me those sci-fi of the 50's or 60's, with state-of-art FX. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "O Som do Trovão" ("The Sound of Thunder")