Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Fun Movie If You Don't Take It Too Seriously, August 1, 2006
I have not read the Ray Bradbury short story, so I can't speak as to how the movie compares to it. Taken as an individual work, this film is not bad at all. The key is to not take everything so seriously. There's a lot of action to enjoy and much of it is very creative. The film is basically clean and probably should have been rated PG.
For those of you who like to take your films seriously, I have several warnings.
1) The effects are not great, and in some scenes downright poor. The scenes in which the characters travel along Chicago streets in 2055 are very weak, but the scenes of the various "animals" are pretty decent.
2) The acting is not very good. Ben Kingsly does well as the evil rich guy, but Edward Burns seems to have been given poor lines and direction. The female lead, Catherine McCormick, is completely unlikeable throughout the film as an angry radical.
3) The time travel logic doesn't really make sense. The concept of the butterfly effect is that some minor change in the past can lead to major changes in the future. However, in this film things just don't add up.
Still, I watched this film with no expectation of it being good, and I ended up having a fun time watching it. I just ignored the 3 points I mentioned above. I enjoyed seeing the characters trying to overcome their challenges to defeat the various "animals" they encountered. There was quite a bit of action and suspense that was fun.
If you enjoy sci-fi films, but aren't too much of a purist, you'll probably have fun with this. Don't expect any special features, because all you have are the 2 trailers.
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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A movie that's painful to watch, May 4, 2006
I love sci-fi and I love Ray Bradbury's work so I waited with some anticipation for this movie to open. Fortunately, I heeded the bad reviews and word-of-mouth and waited for it to come out on DVD.
It's one of the worst movies I've seen in months and that includes a lot of really awful movies on the Sci-Fi channel. Many of the dinosaur FX are actually well-done, but the external shots of traffic on the streets is so bad I truly wished they'd just had the actors sit in a dark room somewhere to utter their dialogue instead. Those effects are just inexcusably bad, anyone with a Mac and a free afternoon could probably do better.
The underlying story is fascinating, travelling back in time to hunt dinosaurs seems like the ultimate safari. It is also reckless but hunting the same dino moments before you know he's to die makes some sense. However, they never get around to explaining how they keep hunting him over and over, sending teams back to the same instant and they never overlap or even see each other. Huh? Throw me a bone and at least toss out some techno-babble to explain this. Grrr. In the short story this is based on they hunted a different animal on each safari which avoids this problem completely.
There is also the hackneyed story of the greedy entrepreneur, but in this case it's amusing. Did the scientist really not know that research she's doing for someone else will be patented by that someone else? I hope this isn't bad news to people working for DOW, JPL or other major firms. The film also wastes the talents of some good actors. What bet did Ben Kingsley lose to end up in this movie?
The contrivance of 'time waves' is hilariously bad, and the fact that one of the scientists instantly knows that's what is happening is silly. But not as silly as the 'evolutions' that begin to take place. Okay, critters that are part simian and part reptilian are a bit on the impossible side, but when they begin to hang upside down like wingless bats...this is easily the dumbest concept in the entire movie. And despite never having seen human beings, they instantly ignore any other prey to focus on people.
In the short story the change they've inadvertently caused is apparent the moment the time travellers return to the now-altered present. This makes more sense than the movie's idea of time waves which seem like just a means to draw the story out and try to build suspense. The time waves themselves are only explained in a very perfunctory manner and leads to an internal inconsistency. Why do you have to go back a year before the first time travel safari to undo the damage, why not just one minute before?
And why, oh why, run all over the city to search for what might have been inadvertently killed instead of just going back in time to prevent it in the first place? It would have cut in half the time I had to spend watching this and most of the characters wouldn't have died. Then again, by that point I was rooting for the ape-dinosaur-bat creatures.
They also barely mention how the unintentional smushing of a tiny bug in the distant past has caused disaster in the present. Was it eggs it didn't lay or air it didn't move as it flapped it's wings? A bug that almost certainly would have died when the nearby volcano erupted anyway. Yet somehow killing that bug kept the dinosaurs alive...uh, wait, I thought it was a huge meteor strike that killed them and most species on Earth at the time. One bug must trump the meteor because suddenly they're back and humans never evolved beyond primates.
The short story shared the problem of trying to claim that the death of this tiny bug made a major change to the future, but it was not nearly as big as the change in the movie, merely the outcome of an election. And it was a short story published in 1952, not a movie 110 minutes long made in 2005. The idea was that actions that might seem unimportant can have an unexpectedly large cumulative effect on the future. Just not to the ludicrous extent depicted in this movie.
Rent it if you must and if I've lowered your expectations enough you may find it possible to watch the entire movie. Just don't blame Ray Bradbury.
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10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
NOT THAT BAD, April 3, 2006
This movie didn't deserve all the bad press that it received. It certainly deserved to do a lot better at the box office but obviously overall bad press sounded its death knell. Sure, 10 years later and it still doesn't hold a candle to Jurassic Park. The CGI was dodgy in parts and the story, as with all time travel stories, falls a bit flat.
But if its entertainment you're looking for then this is an above average action adventure yarn that should have you paying attention throughout. The idea is not to pay too much attention to the plausibility and merely just enjoy it for what it is. There are far too many 'critics' out there looking for plotholes in movies. Leave science and time travel theory to the scientists and mathematicians. Hollywood is not about laws of physics, its about profits and entertainment.
I've seen far worse time travel movies that have done better at the box office. This one has an interesting premise which unfortunately doesn't get fleshed out enough but that probably wasn't the idea anyway.
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