Spoilers Ahead.
I saw the movie "A Sound of Thunder" last night with Joe. We both were transfixed in wonder and terror. It was quite possibly the most flawed and horribly stupid movie I've ever seen. Joe says it wasn't quite as bad as "Master of Disguise," but as I didn't see it, I can't say for certain. Here's my beef: There's a trend in movie's these days to create horribly illogical plots around wholly invented or misconstrued scientific principles.
The premise of the movie is (hardly) based on a Ray Bradbury story. Some 50 years in the future, a private company develops the means to take tourists back in time to the dinosaur age on a Safari. To protect the timeline, the hunters only kill an animal they know will die at a certain place an time. That's the last point in the film that anything makes sense.
At one point, something goes horribly wrong and the tourists lives are in danger. One of them steps out of the designated safe area and kills a butterfly which alters the entire evolutionary history of the planet.
The travelers return to their own time and are none the wiser that anything is changed--until 24 hours after their adventure, when a "time wave" streaks across the planet and leaves behind in it's wake an alternate earth, overgrown by vines. (Yes, vines.)
This leaves those of us with at least a high school education wondering why a time wave would happen 24 hours after the initial jump, as if time were somehow dictated by our arbitrary measurement of the circadian cycle of the earth.
The "scientists" in the film deduce that the changes are happening only to "less evolved" creatures first. The time wave will effect the humans last because they were "the last creatures to evolve." ("Less evolved" being plants and insects.) It truly makes one wonder how a script can even make it past the slush pile without the slightest bit of fact checking. Some coked-up executive in Hollywood actually said to himself, "This sounds like a great idea." How again are plants less evolved than humans? And in what moron's understanding of the theory of evolution did everything stop evolving once
homo sapiens emerged? (Throughout the film, they keep saying idiotic things like: "Those creatures have really evolved!")
It seems that the scientists can explain why their fool-proof method of protecting the timeline by selecting a doomed animal for the hunt failed by citing the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. For those of you unfamiliar with the HUP, the film breaks it down for us. You see, you can't know anything for sure 100%.
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
actually explains why you can't precisely know the exact position and momentum of a particle. Think of a taking a photograph of a bullet. If you use a really fast shutter speed you can freeze the bullet and know exactly where it is, but you have know idea how fast it is traveling. If you use a slower shutter speed, you don't quite freeze the bullet, but you can see the blur and gauge how fast it is traveling.
The principle that they meant to cite was "Murphy's Law" which dictates that if a movie can suck, it probably will.
I could go on and on about this film, but I won't because it makes me tired. This is what's passing for science fiction in the theatre these days. What a mislabeling. I propose the creation of a new genre to the film board:
"Fiction Science"
