By Geno McGahee
Ray Bradbury brings us into the future when time travel is possible in the 1989 episode of THE RAY BRADBURY THEATER, “A SOUND OF THUNDER.” Eckles (Kiel Martin) is a wealthy big game hunter, looking for something new and exciting. He has conquered every world and heard of this program where you can be brought into the past and kill a dinosaur. He quickly signs up and is very excited, but has to deal with Travis (John Bach), the guide that is a complete hard ass. Travis has no interest in what Eckles is saying. When he tries to explain why he wants to do this, Travis quickly cuts him off. That is terrible customer service.
They enter a time machine and go back in time and Travis brought back up. He has a guy with a patch. I don’t know why so many of the 1980’s TV shows and films put guys in patches. This took place in the future. Surely, if they had the technology to go back in time, they had the technology to fix his vision. Perhaps he just wore the patch to get chicks, but you would think his time travelling would do the trick. Then again, I can’t remember Doc from BACK TO THE FUTURE getting much loving after he created his time machine.
The time machine lands and the group approach a giant T-Rex and even though it could have looked much better, it wasn’t all that bad for a made for TV sort of thing. Eckles freezes and can’t pull the trigger, leaving the group to finish the job. Travis isn’t happy with the overall trip, but at least he can go home and everything will be OK. Well, as we know, any little thing that you change in the past can have a butterfly effect for the future and they even pounded the point home, making the problem butterfly related.
The future is now full of complete idiots. So he probably ended up in our time. Travis is furious with Eckles and puts a gun to his head. (SPOILER) He splatters Eckles brains and now must figure a way to get things back to normal. He has a time machine. All he needs to do is go back, talk to his old self, have him kill Eckles before the trip, and then everything will be great. Killing Eckles when he did didn’t make a difference. It probably felt good, but it didn’t accomplish anything. Besides, Eckles was not educated enough on the trip. He signed up and before he knew it, he was armed and walking onto a time machine with a guy with a patch marching behind him. He was probably thinking that “the guy with the patch better not whip out his T-Rex in front of me or I’ll bite the thing off.”
A SOUND OF THUNDER is a little bit TOTAL RECALL and a little bit JURASSIC PARK, but obviously not as good as those films. The performances were strong in this and it was enjoyable. The idea of time travel has always been interesting to me, but I’ve never wanted to go back to the dinosaur days. I would drop in to the sixties with the hope to save the world from 70’s bush. Perhaps one day the technology will be there and I will be chosen for such things.
I recommend A SOUND OF THUNDER. It’s interesting and has its neat moments.
Rating: 5.5/10
